by Lonnie Carter
CHARACTERS in order of appearance -
IDA B. O’SHEA, African-American, 35, not counting, author of Young Adult novels
SITA DEVI, Indian, 35, counting, novelist, activist
TIME – Late summer 2001
PLACE – IDA B’s apartment, downtown Manhattan
Both women, at times, speak on invisible, hands-free cellphones.
We do NOT hear the cellphones ring.
Suddenly, one or the other is talking in that otherworldly, loudly way which
drives us all, except the speaker, bonkers.
IDA B
Duelling -
SITA
- Prologues Duelling -
IDA B
- Prologues
IDA BEE
Projects. The Projects. Twenty stories, twenty-five.
Stuff black people in these cinder blocks, in cities such as Chicago
won’t burn, no repeat of the Great Chicago Fire ’cause they’re cinders
already
‘cinder’ like no Cinderella, nothing but wicked sisters in these cavernous
symbols
of what The Man would have you believe his length is stuffing black people, making sure that the oldest mammies are at the very
top so when the elevators don’t work and rivers of piss running down
the stairwells that Mama Lucy and Sister MayAnn have to climb that
mountain, they have been to the mountain and now their wheelchairs are
rolling through the Valley of Death
stuffing black people in these towers to contain them no sister with hair
long enough to be Rapunzel, can’t let herself down from the twenty-fifth
stuffing black people like anchovies in olives, sardines in cans, Japanese in
subways, Sowetans in buses, Jews in cattle cars twenty-five stories high
stuffing black people like pimientos into the Projects, the blood-red
pimiento Projects, very Yin and Yang, that red on our black skin
Projects with names such as the Ida B Wells Projects, the Robert Parker
Projects and my fave of faves, the Cabrini Green Projects, named
after Mother Cabrini, an Italian immigrant come to Chicago who
started shelters, no twenty-five story shelters to be sure Cabrini Green, ten blocks to the south be Marina Towers, a sort of unleaning
Tower of Pisa, chocked with shops and white people and The Loop, the
Sears Tower, onetime tallest building in the world and Michigan
Avenue’s magic mile
Cabrini Green, ten blocks to the north be Lincoln Park where elevators do
work and gentrification is the perk of Lincoln Park
named after the Great
Emancipator Proclamator
His Gettysburger Rapp
Held the South to the Union’s map
Frederick Douglass Dapper
The first U.S Cabinet Rapper
Now Cabrini Green
Smashed up between
The North and South House
Divided against itself it cannot stand
and the high rises in the middle will fall to the land
‘Cause the decades have gone and gone and it’s clear that you cannot have a
series of buildings set far apart and twenty-five stories high with
people throwing their Ebony and Jetsam on to the broken asphalt below
and that these caves piled on top of each other have to come down
courtesy of the wrecker’s ball and chain
Because the experimentation, the alienation, the denial of alimentation
weren’t ever going to work
Come down, Cabrini Greenies
Come down, Robert Parkers
Come down, Ida B. Wells
You got to get down
so we can now be all stuffed into two three story housing, human size not
Babel size keep all that speechifying air up there on the twenty-fifth all
sky where towers used to be.
I’m Ida B. O’Shea, named after the aforesaid Ida B Wells, and you just heard
a little part of my story for free.
And later we’ll discuss my fee.
SITA DEVI
‘Thug’, from the Hindi meaning ‘thief’, he who strangulates his victim. A rockclimber I picked up at the Chelsea Arts Club last year said as we
climbed each other’s sides – On the face of it it’s all smooth stone even the
craggy is smooth you have to keep telling yourself it’s smooth so it doesn’t
cut you so you don’t slide so you don’t hang on each other’s neck so you hang
only on the neck of the smooth rock as you ascend the ladder think of it as
having rungs that you put your feet in the stirrups as the gyno stares up
your vagino and you stare back down her throat as she hangs on your neck and
you climb together up the smooth stone of the dam where the thugs await you
to thrust you back down but you won’t stop protesting and climbing the ladder
because two million tribal people have been displaced because of this dam you
must climb sheer stone up its side
two million for the sake of hydroelectricity
for the sake of Hyderabad
What’s two mill when we got a bill
Hire some thugs, say a hundred thou, not enough thugging going around these
days, easy to line up, some of them a little out of strangulation practice
but no matter
put them on top of the dam, let all the little Joshuas and Joshuettes march
around down bottom blowing their horns ’til they see the walls ain’t coming
tumblerin’ down and then they’ll climb up pretending it’s a ladder hoping for
a climax, which by the by is Greek for ladder, and when
they get to the top they’ll find out this ain’t no Chelsea Arts Club and
those rockclimbers won’t be climbing their sides because it’s nothing smooth
it’s all craggy
and I know this but I need to keep saying it to myself or I won’t keep doing
it because it doesn’t come naturally to me even though my mother was an
organizer and won the right in court for a Christian woman to inherit the
property of her parents something never before allowed in all of India I’d
much rather be writing a second novel but I can’t seem to get away from the
dam and that rockclimber who finally was right but begging the question what
do we do when we get to the top, given that we can disarm the thugs, not be
strangulated even though they’re out of practice, then what? do we tear the
dam down, flood the plains, drown those who’ve refused to be displaced? What
What What?
I’m Sita Devi, named after Sita, wife of Rama , the title of their book
telling their adventures being “The Ramayana”, twenty-five hundred years
young and more of that anon, and named after Devi, the principal Hindu
goddess, and one Phoolan Devi, the so-called Bandit Queen, and more of her
anon, and that’s a part of my story without fee, although if you’d like to
make a contribution for the two million displaced tribal peoples, I’ll dress
up in my sari and you can stuff the rupeees in its folds, and if that doesn’t
sound suggestive, well anon, anon and anon.
IDA B’s on her phone
IDA B
Onyx – O – n – y – x
Du Preee
Capital D u Capital P r e e -
E – no, two ‘e’s
Capital D u Capital P r e – e
IDA B’s off her phone.
She’s this year’s winner
SITA
Onyx DuPree, three ‘e’s.
IDA
Two.
SITA
Winner of what?
IDA B
The Ida B Wells Project Survivor Award.
SITA
What’s that?
IDA B
I’m just now telling you about it
SITA
I thought you told me everything.
IDA B
I do.
SITA
Why haven’t I heard of this before?
IDA B
Because I can’t tell you everything all at once.
SITA
It’s not a very good name.
IDA B
Onyx Dupree? It’s her name.
SITA
The Ida B Wells Project Survivor Award.
IDA B
Why?
SITA
It’s demeaning.
IDA B
How so?
SITA
It sets her apart.
IDA B
She IS set apart.
She sets herself apart.
Both.
SITA
What’s she done?
IDA B
Survive.
SITA
As have others.
IDA
Brilliantly. More so. Most so.
One has to be chosen.
SITA
Why?
IDA B
Because I give, through my foundation, 1.2 this year, 1 last year, 1.4 next
year, to maintain, obtain, retain programs.
SITA
Sustain, plantain, taintain -
IDA B
Programs!
SITA
Schmograms.
IDA B
For those who have survived the projects with one each year most
distinguished.
SITA
Segregating Little Miss Onyx DuPree, three ‘e’s, out.
IDA B
What would you have me do?
I’m rewarding excellence.
SITA
Fine.
IDA B
Don’t say ‘fine’ to me.
Do you have a foundation?
SITA
I get FROM foundations.
SITA’s on her phone.
Yes. Who?
Shah Rukh Roshan.
Yes.
Get him.
SITA is off her phone.
IDA B
Shah what?
SITA
Shah whom.
Shah Rukh Roshan, Indian heartthrob, one of the so-called Mt. Rushmore of
Indian actors.
IDA B
For what?
SITA
For whom?
For me.
For – whatever we’re calling it.
IDA B
Calling what?
SITA is on her phone.
SITA
Yes.
Tell him – yes. Is he there?
Shah Rukh – yes.
I’ll be there.
I know it’s not the same as saying I’ll be in it, but I will be there.
In a few.
SITA is off her phone.
Pheww!
IDA B
What is it that you’re not in, whatever you’re calling it?
SITA
The working title is – One’s Happy, the Other Isn’t.
I’ve told you, it’s based on the novel.
IDA B
Your novel.
One’s Sad, the Other isn’t.
SITA
This is the upbeat version.
IDA B
For the play – London.
SITA
For the movie – Bombay.
IDA B
You didn’t tell me.
SITA
I thought I did.
IDA B
I thought you told me everything.
SITA
Obviously not.
IDA B
Onyx DuPree is an albino.
SITA
Do tell.
IDA B
I am.
SITA
One’s Happy, the Other Isn’t -
IDA B
No albinos.
SITA
Is she happy?, with her Ida B Wells Award, or isn’t she?
IDA B
I’m bringing her to New York, tomorrow, escorted by her sister, Amethyst -
SITA
Amethyst?
IDA B
Amethyst Rashad, her sister’s name – black as, well, black AS; then I’m going
to Chicago for a ceremony amidst the rubble of her project.
SITA
We’re bringing One’s Happy, the Other Isn’t to New York, then I’m going to
Chicago for its opening at the Cultural Center.
IDA B
The Cultural Center used to be the main public library. It’s where I learned
to read. The main public library now is named the Harold Washington library,
named after the late mayor, a large, that is, fat black man, a wonderful
fellow-reformer, gay, even jolly at times, engaged to the same woman for
something like forty-five years, his beard at all public functions, a
chain-smoking gourmand -
SITA
His fiancee?
IDA B
Harold – dropped dead at his desk, now Richie Daley, son of the late, 1968,
Grant Park Nazi commando, Democratic National Convention, Abbie
Hoffman-Yippie-gassing Hizzoner Richard J. Daley, never get a person of
color, gay or nay, back at that city hall, doomed from the beginning, at
Harold’s swearing-in, his driver locked his official car with the keys in the
ignition. driver, black of course, pounding the window, new Mayor Harold
approaching, a pork-bellied white seargeant comes by with a wire coathanger,
slides it down the window, unlocks the door and walks away unthanked.
SITA
Doomed from the outset.
IDA B
Doomed.
Now Jesse Jackson’s son has become the King of Beers with the Budweiser
distributorship and Jesse’s love-child wiles away her two years in Los
Angeles.
Now if only Oprah could admit on her program that she’s gay she really would
take over the world, having by latest count, only forty-three perce nt of the
global vote.
SITA
The percentage that gave you Clinton for eight years.
IDA B
The first and only black president.
SITA
The blip-on-the-radar President between Bushies.
IDA B’s on her phone.
Yes.
What about the tickets?
They’re travelling together.
Onyx, Amethyst -
Sapphire?
No Sapphire.
Two – Onyx, Amethyst.
No Ruby, Emerald, Jade
IDA B’s off her phone.
Jesus -
` SITA’s on her phone.
SITA
Yes -
The Indian population of Chicago has doubled since 1990.
Shah Rukh Roshan is known to them all.
Brad Pitt is the Shah Rukh of the States
SITA’s off her phone.
Publicists.
IDA B
He’ll be glad to hear it.
SITA
Who?
IDA B
Brad.
SITA
Indians don’t live in the Projects.
IDA B
And thus will never win the Ida B. Wells Project Survivor Award.
SITA
We scale heights of a different nature.
IDA B
I’m sure you do.
IDA B
Seventy minutes?
SITA
Thereabouts. Between calls. Shuttle to catch.
IDA B
Let’s turn the phones off.
SITA
No.
A lot to accomplish. Wasting seconds.
IDA B
Does it have to be breakneck?
SITA
No, it’ll be at our own pace, but knowing that this time it’ll be different.
IDA B
Cramming?
SITA Slamming.
IDA B
Be not facile with the rhyming. Just the facts.
SITA
Rhyming is the facts. But only infrequently this time. Mostly prose. For
the present. This is where we left off.
IDA B
After duelling monologues, crossing our swords. Phoolan Devi, the Bandit
Queen of India, about whom a movie of that name was made which you detested -
SITA
Because it made her weepy, and if she had been weepy all the time, she would
have accomplished nothing.
You’re Ida B. Wells, suffragist, anti-lynching lecturer and in fact Rosa
Parks before Rosa Parks.
IDA B
We’re showing each other how we got to be who we are, invoking our namesakes,
in the clearest possible way.
SITA
It is our way, mutually devised -
IDA B
And you’re not at all concerned -
SITA
Say it.
IDA B
An artificiality -
SITA
We each have our agenda, and within the boundaries of the items, there is
room for spontaneity, and it’s very definitely thinking WITHIN the box. All
this thinking OUTSIDE the box is missing the point. All this talk of being
‘proactive’, whatever the bloody hell that means, the corporate ‘heads-up’
boozwhah – like – DUH – very active?, active before active, ur-active – a
friend, fifty-five, she likes to say she’s hit the speed limit, was having a
thing with a man sixty-five. She had high hopes.
IDA B (singing)
She had hi – i – i – hopes
She had hi – i – i – hopes
SITA
And he says to her, “We’ll be with each other forever.”
IDA B (singing)
High apple pie in the sky – i – i hopes.
SITA
The next day they’re having a furious knockabout and he says ‘It’s over’, and
she says, ‘But you said to me we’d be with each other forever’ and he says -
SITA simul IDA B
But I didn’t mean it proactively!
SITA
I told you -
IDA B
Kinda sorta maybe – like – which – who – why – where – WHATEVER!
SITA
Like a sixty-five year old fucker is talking this rot. Everything we need is within the box. It’s how we arrange the atoms within
that gives any artificiality its naturalness, in fact, its true artifice -
the making of art, if you will.
IDA B
I will, and you made ‘The Farts’.
SITA
Excuse me?
IDA B
The Farts and Seizure section of the New Grey, now colorized, New Jerk Times.
SITA
Really? And they have me expatiating on what burning issue?
IDA B
O, it’s just a puff piece on Asians in the arts.
SITA
O, please, they didn’t use that some old tired quote – scratch it, they
couldn’t find me.
IDA B
They couldn’t find you?
SITA
I was in the Valley, I got one of those third degree isolation messages -
screw the Farts
alright – here are ten tasks – we’ll get to as many as we can – one for each
of the major Upanishads.
IDA B
But you’re not a Hindu.
SITA
In the sense that I am an Indian person, in the broadest sense, that’s all
the word means.
IDA B
All?
SITA
That’s what the word means.
IDA B
So a Muslim Indian is a Hindu.
SITA
In that sense.
IDA B
And a C of E and an R C Indian is a Hindu.
SITA
What complicates this is that all Muslims think that all people are Muslims,
either practicing, if that’s the word -
IDA B
Why not?
SITA
Or practitioners-in-waiting. Infidels-in-waiting to be fidels, Arabic
Castros, but he trims his beard and definitely doesn’t pray five times a day.
IDA B
Hey, what do Muslim fundamentalists – now there’s a word that needs
re-examination -
SITA
How about exAMination – think of Fidel.
IDA B (sing-song)
Ain’t no fun in de mentalism
Ain’t no fun
Ain’t no fun
Ain’t no fun in de male jism
Ain’t no fun
Ain’t no fun
Ain’t no fun in de mentalism
SITA
Fidel had a beautiful teenage mistress -
This stops IDA B, as SHE’s about to go off. It’s her story and SHE’ll
cry it if she wants to.
IDA B
- in 1959, you know the way Cubano muchachas are so gorgeous, and in her
mid-twenties, she escaped to Little Habana and did the requisite right-wing
tricks and years later when she no longer so ‘deliciosa’and pretty right on
‘gordita’, the brilliant CIA, the Costume Intelligence Agency, enlists her to
go back and kill the Old Man, with her special brand of poisoned cupidity,
and she gets back and finds her way to his pad, where she finds him in bed
snoring through a cloud of Macanudos, and he snorts awake and says, ‘Mi nina,
‘Yo se’ you’re here to make me ‘muerte’ and I have a loaded pistola under my
pillow, ‘venga a me, negrita’, and end ‘mi vida loca’ and she found that
afternoon that she was still ‘deliciosa’ and only pleasantly ‘gordita’ after
all.
SITA
Ah, these Fidels-in-waiting.
IDA B
If they wait too long, they get Kalishnikoved.
SITA
Some Muslims believe that, I believe.
IDA B
Muhammed Ali.
SITA
A man of peace.
IDA B
Saw the replay of his fight with Sonny Liston in Lewiston, Maine, not that
that fight was fixed, the drunken hunter singing the National Anthem forgot
the words, yon Cassius Clay with the lean and hungry look that eve was no Man
of Peace.
SITA
You’re a prizefight fan, the Sweet Science?
IDA B
What’s your spectator sport-of-choice? The Afghanis roar up and down a sort
of unmarked polo field trying to ram the head of a decapitated ram across a
goal of rusty spikes. It’s Harry Potter meets Ichabod Crane in burnoose,
caftan and diaper brain.
SITA
I’m fond of basketball – Magic Johnson soon to have his ten year anniversary
of his HIV announcement, admitting twenty thousand sexual encounters with
women, keeping no count of the boytoys.
IDA B
That was Wilt the Stilt. Magic only got to about ten grand.
SITA
Do the arithmetic. Twenty thousand divided by three hundred and sixty-five -
IDA B
About sixty.
SITA
So, for sixty years, every day of the year, he has a different chippie.
IDA B
Hey, black don’t crack.
SITA
Not at all an honorary white man.
IDA B
I wouldn’t think so.
SITA
Unlike Michael.
IDA B
Must be some white men we can talk about.
SITA
Boredom cubed.
IDA B
Try me.
SITA
Harry Potter, Ichabod Crane.
IDA B
Some bod, Ichabod, I’m gwine sneeze -
Black achoo!
SITA
An anthropologist, an apologist for anthros, writing about cows and Indians -
IDA B
CowBOYTOYS and Indians.
SITA
Sacred cows and Indians – insists that Indians would NOT rather starve than
eat their cows.
IDA B
Cows work the fields, give milk.
SITA
And not much use as a one-time steak dinner.
IDA B O’OSHEA
If you’re an asshole for the entire day and suddenly for the last four
seconds before we pass out, before I’ve given you a bodyrub and you’ve
complained that I haven’t gotten the toes right, before which you’ve jumped
up and down in your jumping up and down way, trying hard not to say
manic-depressive way, you’re suddenly nice, am I supposed to accept you as a
nice perosn?
IDA B
However marbled, crapping on the marble floors of the Taj Mahal Catch his new album?
SITA
Nothing religious about the prohibition on eating cows. Pure pragmatism.
Indians would, in fact, starve if they DID eat their cows.
IDA B
We’ve got to talk. Jump right in. I’ve got to know.
SITA
Later. Or next time. We have other matters.
IDA B
I want to know your reasons.
SITA
You know my reasons.
IDA B
I want to know them organically.
SITA
You mean like a fruit?
IDA B
Like a bloody vegetable.
SITA
We’ll touch upon it as I’m leaving. Reserve the final five.
IDA B
My hands are cracking already. The summer’s barely ended and it’s time to
break out the lotion again.
SITA laughs.
Why are you laughing?
SITA
Because you say ‘Black don’t crack.’
IDA B
It doesn’t.
SITA
I’ll be white black
I’ll put it in my black pocket.
IDA B
What are you -
SITA
I’m doing you.
IDA B
Dick, I wrote Dick.
SITA
The one who kept pecking away at your ‘bosoms’, as he called them?
IDA B
And I wrote Thea.
SITA
What’s it in “A Clockwork Orange”? ‘Bezoomny groodies’. Burgess is playing
with the Russian sounds like ‘Bolshoi spaseeba’, like the ballet – big – it
just means ‘big’.
IDA B
In fact, I’m trying to complain and you’re talking novels. I write Dick I
wrote Thea, I wanted to know if they were alright.
SITA
Maybe I should start messing with the Urdu.
IDA B
Tell me if I’m way off.
SITA
Russian still, or again, has cachet. That midget ferret who runs the Steppes
now, Vladie Pootie, kiss my booty – whereas Urdu -
IDA B
So what if one’s my ex-husband, one my ex-, I wrote them both not to check on
them, but just to find out if they’re O.K. Tell me if it’s me -
SITA
It – is – you.
IDA B
Come on, I’m serious.
SITA
So – am – I.
I’m getting right black to you.
IDA B
I wanted to know if they’re alright.
SITA
When the Russkies say ‘Bolshoi’ they mean the best ballet. When the
Amurricans say ‘big’, they mean some dumb movie or their toy missiles.
SHE pronounces it ‘miss-aisle’.
IDA B
Is it so , what? Pushy, intrusive – Dick, Thea -
SITA
Have they become a couple?
IDA B
Couple? She’s a stone dike and he, he just married a Jew.
SITA
Why’s that pertinent?
IDA B
Because after me, me who was only liked, that is the only thing his parents
liked about me was that I WASN’T a Jew, he said he’d only be with white
Gentile Central Euro-trash.
SITA
Ah, the Euro-trash, one could take it out to the alley every night for late
pickup.
IDA B
Czechs like his family of lost and last royalty. Do you know that even after
the divorce I retain the title ‘Baroness’?
SITA
Definitely the steamiest shite on the pavement.
IDA B
And that I might even have rights to an ancestral ‘domu’?
SITA
Duomo? As in Rome, do as the duomos?
IDA B
Ask Anthony Burgess. He’ll tell you it’s authentic Bohemian.
SITA
Bohunk to you too.
IDA B
‘Sriyoo na jeden kopu’.
SITA
They all shit on the same pile.
IDA B
Said our Slovak maid.
SITA
Whose groodies beguiled you until Dickie poo found you in the woodshed and
thus the divorce.
IDA B
Love is never having to take off your sari.
SITA
I’m not.
IDA B
It’s from a novel, sort of.
SITA
It’s sort of from a novel, which was sort of a novel.
IDA B
You know, you can’t attack me this way.
SITA
What way? I’m trying to understand the way you think.
Alright, you write Dickie poo and this lipstick lesbo -
IDA B
That’s not who she is.
SITA
With whom you’ve supped at the Sapphic table -
IDA B
I never really liked it.
SITA
With me or with her?
IDA B
With her, with her, don’t twist this, I write them both, separately, I’m
reaching out to them and I admit I said to them remarkably similar things
because I just wanted to know if they were alright.
SITA
Why wouldn’t they be?
IDA B
As the world turns, they were both on that island, Barbados, no not Barbados,
the one with the recent tornado, actually not so recent, so it was odd that I
was checking in with them now, I mean we should check in/on people
immediately after a disaster, quite by accident they were both there, quite
by accident did I find this out, so I reached out to each, to them both
because I hadn’t heard and because when someone’s so strongly in your life
and then not, you still care, don’t you?
SITA
Did you hear from them?
IDA B
Don’t you?
SITA
Did you?
IDA B
Yes, briefly, after a bit, not immediately, and they were separately fine and
then I wrote them back -
SITA
So you wrote them twice.
IDA B
Well -
SITA
Jesus -
IDA B
What ‘Jesus’? I was concerned. What’s so -
SITA
Two ex’s you ostensibly have nothing to do with -
IDA B
What ‘ostensibly’?
SITA
And you’re tracking them down and they allow themselves to be tracked.
IDA B
I’m not a bloody bloodhound. You’re making me sound crazy.
SITA
And then you track them down again.
IDA B
I wrote them in a spirit of – they wrote back in this cool manner, as if they
had cooperated on the language. Don’t you think that that’s odd?
SITA
That they really don’t want to have anything to do with you?
IDA B
But we were in each others’ lives, am I such a bad person, did I hurt them so
badly that nothing -
SITA
Give it up, Give it Black!
IDA B
This invitation came for you.
SITA
O, that thing.
IDA B
What ‘thing’.
SITA
Guggenheim reunion.
IDA B
Do you want me to come with you to this ‘thing’, this Guggie ‘thing’ the
weekend before Thanksgiving which we have to plan anyway?
SITA
I don’t care.
IDA B
Oh.
SITA
I don’t mean it that way.
IDA B
What way?
SITA
As if I were being dismissive.
IDA B
You know, I know I’m at that level of the novels about never having to take
off your sari. I haven’t read all of Anthony Powell six times.
SITA
Burgess, Anthony Burgess, and nor have I.
IDA B
“Barchester Towers” was written by a whore named Trollope, I mean that’s as
far as I got.
SITA
Don’t do the dumbdown-chic on me.
IDA B
I can’t converse on that level.
SITA
Converse on whatever bloody level you like.
IDA B
I wear ‘Converse’ black sneakers with the no support, ya dig, but I don’t
‘conVERSE’.
SITA
‘Converse’ comes directly from the -
IDA B & SITA
Sanskrit Latin
SITA
It means that there is something between you and it and me and it.
IDA B
I thought that was ‘interesting’ and great.
SITA
Good, you usually say ‘inn-arresting’.
IDA B
What?
SITA
You usually say ‘INN-ARRESTING’. You can spot the basically illiterate by
that solecism.
IDA B
You can’t say I’m solipsistic.
SITA
‘Solecism’, not ‘solipsism’.
IDA B
Unso, highly unso, and it’s inter-esting – THAT means there’s something
between you and it and me. ‘Converse’ means something ‘turning with’ -
SITA
Good. Go on.
IDA B
Don’t condescend.
SITA
One of my more engaging qualities.
IDA B
Now ‘engaging’ -
SITA
Stick with ‘converse’.
IDA B
And it’ll stick you.
I’m just a musical theater chick.
I’m not a lexikaka -
kagrapher
SITA
O, please. Where’s the Samuel Johnson I gave you?
IDA B
O, just detonate another ‘A’ bomb.
SITA
Excuse me?
IDA B
Why didn’t you touch me that last time?
SITA
I can’t just go at it.
IDA B
Afraid of dying of moral turpitude?
We’ll both die of that before we die from no Indian bomb.
I’ll give you that.
Touch – touch – like the ceiling of the Sistine fucking Chapel!
SITA
That God doesn’t touch.
IDA B
‘That’ God? Well ‘that’ God reaches out and down and ‘that’ Adam reaches out
and up. Arriba Arriba!
SITA
What’s the matter, your Valium wear off?
IDA B
I want wine.
SITA
If you’re going to start throwing it down -
IDA B
Pools of it -
SITA
If you wind up blasted -
IDA B
With ecstasy, I’m on the wagon, for Christ’s sake and what gives you the
right to use the Lord’s name in vain? I, I have the right, you do not.
SITA
Correct. I am neither Hindu nor Muslim and only temperamentally Buddhist. I
am a secularist, as are you. Just in case you were wondering.
IDA B
I always find it odd when people just announce who and what they are.
SITA
You do it every second.
IDA B
I do not.
How so?
SITA
All these pictures of yourself everywhere.
Ida B at three
Ida B at five with prize cat
IDA B
Everard.
SITA
Indeed.
IDA B
Veddy British. I would have thought you would have approved.
SITA
You would have thought.
Ida B with dog.
IDA B
Henry.
SITA
Ida B with Dickie poo.
IDA B
Richard.
SITA
Ida B with Thea, looking like a dragged-out version of Martina Navratilova.
IDA B
Martina in drag – we met her and she said Thea smelled of tobacco, right to
her face.
SITA
Thea’s tobacco face, having just dragged, was no doubt in her tobacco-less
face.
Smoking again?
IDA B
I want to know your reasons.
SITA
Inorganically?
I may need a puja.
IDA B
Fill me in.
SITA
A ceremony of anointment to drive away or bring forth – the rain, the sun, a
man, a woman.
Phoolan Devi.
IDA B
O.K, Phoolan, take it away.
SITA
Phoolan Devi is a lower caste woman or was, but that’s giving the story away.
She was repeatedly raped by men of all castes while still a child. At 16,
having somehow survived, although this is the story of many lower caste
women, survival that is, she joined a band of brigands, bandits from lower
and not so lower castes. She quickly became the lover, if that’s the word,
of one of the bandits, also a lower caste man. He became, through sheer
force of will, the head of this gang and together he and Phoolan went on this
rampage. They went to her village where she had been repeatedly raped and
lined up the 20 or so men who had stuck it to her and she and he, and she
especially, murdered them, all of them, in front of their relatives, many of
whom had cheered them on when they had raped her. Then proceded a series of
explosions, robberies, murders of upper caste men, destruction of buildings
and social clubs and mens’ clubs and elitist havens and Phoolan and her
consort became so very popular in the Indian countryside and also in the
press. The other members of the gang became jealous that a lower caste man
had become head of their gang and conspired and then killed him, leaving
Phoolan disenfranchised from her own bandit gang. But in the meantime she
had developed a following among lower caste people as a champion of their
fate and she decided to run for office, for Parliament, which is, if you’ve
ever seen an Americana election, one of complete chaos. Talk about the
Bush-Gore fiasco and the hanging chads and preggers in Florida, that stuff
and that ballot stuffing, electronic or other wise is nothing. Well, lo and
behold, Phoolan wins her seat and is ensconced in Parilament with the Hindus
and the Buddhists and the Muslims and the brahmins and all the others you in
the West know so nothing about. And then she’s there for ten years and she
becomes the champion, I’ve already used that word, scratch that, although
it’s accurate, of the the lower castes and even those above
and she moves into an upper middle class suburb and one day she walks out of
her house and she gets blown away by a “radical student” who can’t stand the
fact that a woman and a lower caste one at that has become a Parliamentarian
and of course he wants to rape her corpse.
Hoping not to destroy completely whaever illusion might have been created,
Please accept me as Phoolan Devi.
IDA B
So what did she do as a Parliamentarian for ten years did she champion the
rights of the poor yes did she sit on the verandas of the rich and powerful
yes did she sip alcohol and put her feet up at exclusive clubs heretofore
reserved for men as the sun set and as the host remarked how pleasant it was
to view all of this as the huge rat scurried behind yes and did she trade and
trade for the scraps of meal and grain for her people in the remotest
villages and what did she give over you heard me what did she give over and
what had she been giving over her life over and did she give over when the
man on the veranda gave over his demeanor that is he decided to notice that
he had allowed her to put her feet up allowed her was his decision because
after all she was a murderer and a lower caste outlaw allowed her to talk to
him in a way he would not have allowed had she not been a lower caste and a
murderer because he wanted her for her legend but for nothing else and so he
restrained himself on the verandah which he was not used to used to the rats
scurrying used to the verandah but not used to restraining himself and she
got what she wanted.
SITA
And it was the morning after we blew up the train we took no care to see if
anyone was on or off lower or upper bunks or castes and this was the train
delivering something governmental something of or to or from or by some
council, something terribly important to the smooth running of the so-called
largest democracy in the world and we wanted to stop it in its tracks so to
speak because we had not ever taken the courses in political science which I
would later take and we knew we readerlesswriterless brigands that we had to
make a statement and we moved on to torching upper caste villas incendiary
Robin Hoods we dared by night as we fucked by day or we fucked by night and
we dared by day and we rammed through my village and we brought the villagers
forth and we demanded the two who had raped me and the two who had raped me
were not surrendered and we I yes I took the twenty young men of the village
the strongest handsomest bravest until now down to the river and the other
villagers heard the roar of gunfire and the shrieks of the twenty and we
moved on and blew up two police stations and we dared and fucked both by day
and night.
IDA B
Next time I want you to tell the story , painfully slowly, about doing the
twenty painfully slowly.
SITA
I shall.
So your Ida B Wells was the original Rosa Parks, Rosa before Rosa, sub rosa.
Ida B. Wells, if you please.
IDA B
“A Darky Damsel Obtains a Verdict for Damages Against the Chesapeake Ohio
Railroad: What it cost to put a Colored Teacher in a Smoking and Carriage
for $500.”
IDA B plays IDA B. WELLS
SITA plays the Conductor.
IDA B
Nice and comfy in the Ladies’ Coach.
SITA
Have to ask you to move, Ma’am.
IDA B
Aren’t you sweet, calling me ‘Ma’am.
SITA
Askin’ you to move, Ma’am.
IDA B
Don’t know how I ain’t sittin’ here all the time, but Ida B be a teacher so
she better not say ‘ain’t’.
SITA
Ain’t gonna ask you again, Ma’am.
IDA B
Now you, my good man, come from a lower station, you from the lowest of the
four classes or castes, as we like to call ‘em south of the line named after
the Messrs Mason and Dixon, you got the Brahmins, that’s the preachers, and
the rulers, that’s the plantation owners, and the merchants, the small
entrepreneurs, that’s not you yet and then there’s you, my good lowest caste,
you are grateful I know to Vishnu, the preserver, that you are not outcast,
you, sir, are not untouchable, you are within the caste system, you are just
at its lowest rung, and I sure do like the Ladies’ Coach.
SITA
You will repair to the Smokers’ Car just ahead, Madame, or the plantation
owners’ darkies, the biggest, funkiest-butted bucks from the deepest mud of
the Missippissi, and that’s M-i-s-s-i-p-p-i-s-s-i in your eye, will deliver
your Ethiope booty, cheeks a-burnin’, to the platform of the next station, if
you’re lucky enough not to be cast out from all four castes of this Ladies’
Car reserved for the likes of the Daughters of the Alabaster Magnolias.
IDA B
Bring on de bloods, cracker, you saltless saltine, you peanutshell dick, you
pop-up cop, you security stooge and I’ll sue you and the Chesapeake for every
Confederate dollar spent on every whore on Beale Street.
SITA
You do just that and the justice system’ll twist your tits so tight you won’t
never need no Big Mammyogram.
IDA B
Well, I just did take your bony bone-white ass to court and guess what?,
Rebel Yeller, I got awarded $500 in damages, so dust up that seat in the
Ladies’ Car ’cause I comin’ back.
SITA
Then you’d be interested to know that the Tennessee Supreme Court just
overturned that award and says you got to sit with the Smokers ’cause that’s
First Class for the Namibian Jemmimas and their Zulu Bens.
IDA B
“I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would,
when we appeal it, give us justice. I feel shorn of that belief and utterly
discouraged, and just now, if it were possible, I would gather up my race in
my arms and fly away with them. O God, is there no redress, no peace, no
justice in this land for us?”
SITA is again herself.
SITA
Colored justice. For black and brown. For you and me.
IDA B again herself.
IDA B
1884.
SITA
2001.
IDA B
I was six, eight, ten.
We’d leave Chicago before dawn and Bill would drive and he’d never stop and
we had to hold it because we couldn’t stop until dark because we wanted to
get there we so wanted to get there before the time was up. And when we’d
stop overnight why we would have to why would we have to, my grandmother who
could pass went in and rented the room and we’d all sneak out of the car and
into the room and in the morning my grandmother who could pass would pay the
bill and we would all have sneaked back into Bill’s Buick and we’d head off
and we’d get there there being Martha’s Vineyard in our little pastel house
in our little Negro community like the lace curtain Irish I thought our name
being O’Shea and last St. Patrick’s day before the day I called a week or so
and made a reservation for 17 at this Oirish dive around the corner and I
said my name was O’Shea and they said, yes, Ma’am we’ll put some tables
together and then all seventeen of us Blappeople piled into O’Rourke’s or
Hoolihan’s or McGillicuddy’s and I showed them my i.d. with O’Shea and they
had to let us in and they looked at us and we looked at everything and
everyone and we had the grandest time.
SITA
We left India when I was three. We went to London. My mother cried for
years. My father said we couldn’t go back. Last year he went back. He has
a hardware company.
IDA B
Not software?
SITA
I refuse to acknowledge the difference. I’m a Vedic Luddite.
IDA B
What does that mean?
SITA
You know what a -
IDA B
Luddite – the Ludds, country and Western, mother and daughter, momma got
sick, bad sick, saw them in Vegas, before we knew she was sick, backstage, I
was seeing a woman who worked backstage at Caesar’s, late ’80′s, she the
first woman stagehand, crawling over the grids, wires hanging down, dangerous
as all get out being the Little Miss Jackie Robinson of the Techie Union.
Mama Ludd, bouncing about ginghamly, petite, pretty hillbilly, truckdriver
daughter belting, quite a pair.
SITA
The Luddites. Ned Ludd – 1779, half-witted Leicestershire workman who
destroyed stocking frames, a member of early Nineteenth Century English
workmen engaged in attempting to prevent the use of laboursaving machines by
destroying them.
IDA B
Ned Ludd, their great-great-great-great -
SITA
Vedic, from the Sanskrit for ‘I know’.
IDA B
You know – I know – I met the Ludds backstage. They were destroying
machinery. Daughter Ludd did a onceover on yours-so-truly, stopping at my o
so Vedically-knowing booty.
SITA
In London we lived with others like us, we went to school, the various
siblings, ‘Dirty Pakis’ shouted at us, we weren’t Pakis, that is, from
Pakistan, home of the Paki, literally, so how Paki has become a slur -
IDA B
The footballers.
SITA
Yes, the bloody hooligans – just the slobbest of the Slobbos, Slobbodan
Miloshitkevitch, and his cohorts Ratko, giving ‘rat’ a bad name, now he’s
indicted by the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague, he would have fit right in
in our part of London.
IDA B
I thought you loved London.
SITA
I do.
IDA B
Do you have someone there?
SITA
I don’t like this direction.
IDA B
Did you know, you probably did, that the Spanish word ‘direccion’ means
‘address’?
SITA
No, I did not.
IDA B
So if someone, una senorita, with flashing ‘ojos’, asks for your ‘direccion’,
she wants to know where you live.
SITA
Really?
IDA B
I want to know ‘su direccion’, por favor.
I – want – to – know – where – you – live.
SITA
Ida -
IDA B
And why it is that -
IDA B & SITA
You – don’t – live – here. I – don’t – live – here.
SITA
Live with me in London.
IDA B
I don’t like London.
SITA
You don’t like London? What’s that got to do with it, besides the
impossibility of not liking London, if you want to live with me, I can see
not liking New York -
IDA B
Live with me in New York.
SITA
I don’t like New York.
IDA B
You don’t like New York? What’s that got to do with it, besides the
impossibility of not liking New York, if you want to live with me, I can see
not liking London, so I’ll move to London.
SITA
You hate London.
IDA B
It’s impossible to have even a minor quibble about London. Now, New York, on
the other hand -
SITA
Ida B -
IDA B
Sita -
SITA
Look -
IDA B
Stop – listen – look – no, I got the order wrong – listen – stop – look
SITA
Ida B!
IDA B
I’ve stopped. I’m looking both ways and then back the first way, left,
right, left, or in London, right, left, right, now I’m stepping off the curb
in Trafalgar Square and SPLAT!, ‘a la derecha, a la izquierda, a la derecha’
and I’m gored by John Bull, pulling out his horn, thrusting me over his
shoulders, releasing me from the cleaving of his horn, as I go hurtling
through the air, all the way to North London ‘y su direccion’.
SITA
To the Tricycle Theatre on the Northern Line of the tube, colored black that
line, on the Kilburn High Road, down which V. S Naipaul rode double-decker
buses, as vital a place in all of London for the precise reason that there
are little or no English present, the Indian Subs, Sri Lankans, and the IRA
is there, and the Poles and their bakery next to the Tricycle, and the
Jamaicans, the Saint Lucians, Barbadians and the Irish Republican Army, have
I mentioned them? and the Poles who left Jaruzelski’s martial law, Nevis
Mountaineers, Montserrat volcano victims, Scottish separatists and no, or
few, English.
IDA B
We’ll get a flat, ride the double-deckers and Naipaul will give us his seat.
SITA
No, he’ll give one of us a seat, you, I think, and he’d have the aisle.
IDA B
I’ll stand, I’ll stand by your man.
And so it’s settled.
We’ll live in North London with nary the English and we’ll foment and
ferment. We’ll drink some wine and plot the revolution.
Are there Asians?
SITA
You weren’t listening.
IDA B
I mean, like real Asians – Japanese, Chinese, Korean.
I mean, you’re not really Asian, are you?
SITA
‘Asian’, if you needed further evidence, is a misnomer. I am Indian, some
say that’s not accurate – Kerali – but that’s another discussion.
IDA B
Well, we’ll have so many.
So we’ll live in a building, how many stories?
SITA
Every building has many stories.
IDA B
Eight million stories in the naked city – ever see the series? – we’re too
young for the original – George C. Scott – did you see him in ‘The Hustler’?
with Newman? Are those movies you’ve seen? People hitting thirty right now
have seen ‘The Color of Money’, and it is what it is, then suddenly if
they’re lucky, they see ‘The Hustler’ and it blows them far far away. The
scene in the bar in the morning -
SITA
You’ve told me.
IDA B
Indulge me.
SITA
Just this once.
IDA B
Thank you.
SITA
Indeed, I like the story.
IDA B
You tell it.
SITA
It’s yours.
IDA B
It’s Piper Laurie’s.
SITA
Where is she?
IDA B
Tell it for her.
SITA
Newman – Fast Eddie Felsen, in a bar -
IDA B
Go back.
SITA
In a bus terminal diner, sees Piper Laurie sitting alone. He asks if he can
sit, he’s exhausted and randy simultaneously and she assents, he offers to
buy her coffee, comes on to her, few words, awkward, but he’s so weary he
falls asleep, she pays for his coffee, he wakes, is told she paid, wanders
into a saloon, about eight a.m., she’s there in a booth, he sits down, she’s
drinking, he orders from the bartender, it’s Jake LaMotta, a real-life boxer,
again he comes on, she assents, she gets up from her side of the booth, as
does he, she almost stumbles, he takes her arm, she says’ “It’s O.K., I’m not
drunk, I’m just lame” and he lets her walk ahead and he sees, as do we, she
is indeed. Lame.
IDA B
You’ve left out some details. The name of his bourbon.
SITA
J.T.S. Brown.
IDA B
Important. It shall recur.
SITA
As will her lameness – before she slits her wrists.
IDA B
Scrawling ‘Pervert’ in lipstick letters on the mirror in the hotel bathroom
in Louisville, Kentucky during Derby Week just after she’s succumbed to
George C. Scott as Newman’s off in his own pool. She read books; he did not
- Newman, Scottt did not, not Jackie Gleason as Minnesota Fats, didn’t read a
book. They all wrote the book on exactly what they did – I found this poem -
in a book – which I shall now read to you
SITA
I want to hear it, Piper.
IDA B
If I were lame, I wouldn’t have to -
You never loved me, and yet to save me
One unforgettable night you gave me
Such chill embraces as the snow-covered heights
Receive from clouds, in northern auroral lights
Such keen communion as the frozen mere
Has with immaculate moonlight, cold and clear
And all desire
Like failing fire
Died slowly, faded surely, and sank to rest
Against the delicate chillness of your breast
That’s an Indian love poem.
SITA
I know it.
IDA B
From a book you gave me.
SITA
I know it.
IDA B
You didn’t have this poem marked, but I know you know it.
SITA
For the third time -
IDA B
Would you let me?
SITA
“Sink to rest?”
IDA B
“Against the delicate – “
SITA
Now they want me in it.
IDA B
It?
SITA
It’s a short shooting schedule, even by Bollywood standards -
IDA B
Shooting? I thought it was a play you were working on.
SITA
The play, London; the movie, Bombay.
IDA B
You didn’t tell me about the movie.
SITA
Yes, I did. Maybe I didn’t. What difference does it make?
IDA B
We tell each other everything.
SITA
Obviously, we don’t.
IDA B
I tell you -
SITA
No, you don’t.
IDA B
It’s the work of lovers.
No subject is ever exhausted unless it’s exhausted twenty times over -
between lovers, or something like that. Jane Austen. See, I know my
novelists. Jane said she never had a scene in any of her work with only two
men because she hadn’t the vaguest idea what two men alone would say to each
other. Edward Albee, on the other hand, at least when he came to “Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf”, but not later, does not have a scene between
Martha and Honey, o he has them between George and Martha, George and Nick,
Nick and Martha, George and Honey, but not between Martha and Honey because
he hadn’t at that time the vaguest idea what two women alone would say to
each other and don’t tell me I don’t have ideas.
SITA
I never said you don’t have ideas.
IDA B
You treat me like an idiot.
SITA
I don’t treat you like an idiot, but I’ve heard that Jane Austen line and the
Edward Albee line a dozen times -
IDA B
That’s the point, until exhaustion and beyond and each time I refine it.
SITA
It’s like sugar, it should not be refined and yes you had a point about a
thousand years back when George and Martha weren’t so bloody ancient.
IDA B
Why does everyone get assassinated in India?
SITA
You mean like famous Indians, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther
King?
IDA B
The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. to you. No, like famous Americans named
Gandhi, Gandhi and Gandhi.
The academic on the plane -
SITA
You’ve told me this before.
IDA B
Sorry. Thought I was telling Jane.
He said it’s not going to be the Palestinians and the Israelis in their
little sun-baked corner of the world but the Pakistanis and the Indians
beating each others’ atoms, splitting the hairs of the Sikhs, pulverizing the
Muslims in Kashmir -
SITA
Stop! It’s my part of the world and I know what’s going to happen, what
could happen there at any moment – tell me something I don’t know!
IDA B
I didn’t know you were going to be in your movie.
SITA
I’m not. There’s no time.
I’m going to Boston tonight on the shuttle, late dinner with some Public Fund
people, grant for the Foundation, fly out tomorrow.
IDA B
I have jury duty starting tomorrow. I’ll come to the airport.
SITA
Jury duty.
IDA B
Before. We’ll meet early. It’s down here.
SITA
No, you can’t be late.
IDA B
Where’s your money coming from these days, besides the Public Fund and what’s
that a front for? The old man still forking over?
SITA
I beg your pardon?
IDA B
You can have mine, you know. It’d be one of the perks?
SITA
Are you doing that well?
DIA B
Lots of languages – all the books have been translated many times over and
the money, really, just keeps pouring in. There’s something odd, in that all
these languages you parade, which I don’t know, except my smidgeon pidgeon
Espagnol, are the ones my books are now in, while your novel – of course,
while I write for pre- and barely teens, while you -
SITA
I’m not writing another, you know that.
IDA B
While I -
SITA
You have a formula. You do apprentice bodice-rippers disguised as historical
novels with thirteen year old heroines, starting what, with the founding of
Jamestown and moving forward, decade by decade, up to the Civil War now, are
you?
IDA B
There is a message, a moral, an uplifter, so to speak -
SITA
Of the about-to-be bodice, so to say.
IDA B
Well, you have one -
SITA
You have many -
IDA B
E pluribus One’em.
SITA
You don’t say.
IDA B
I do say, and I say, all this ‘manyness’ could be yours.
SITA
I hear the ring of the New Testament Satan taking the Christ-Man to the top
of the mountain, spreading out the wealth of nations before him, where all
Jesus wants is a return to the desert and some fresh-baked stones.
IDA B
All the money he needed came from the desert and I am only slightly Beelzebub.
SITA
Is that like being a little pregnant?
IDA B
I am capable of bearing a child, but I wouldn’t raise her alone.
SITA
You can’t even take care of yourself, how could you take care of a child?
IDA B
I wouldn’t raise her alone.
SITA
I have mine, thank you.
IDA B
Where is little Bhopal these days?
SITA
GOpal. He was just nine last week and in London.
IDA B
With Grammy.
SITA
He’s just about to be nine.
IDA B
So you didn’t miss his birthday.
SITA
No.
IDA B
Yet. Sure?
SITA
Money comes into the Foundation from various foundations.
IDA B
And it’s all being funnelled into stopping the dam? Instead of sticking your
finger in the dike, you’re the dike sticking your finger or is that little
Bhopal and what is the name of your foundation, girdles, stays, garters?
SITA
The Center for Adolescent Bodice-Rippers.
IDA B
Fredericks of Bollywood.
Mine is the Wells Project.
SITA
Yours is the Wells Project what?
IDA B
My foundation. It gave away 1.2 last year to kids who survive the projects,
kids we’ve identified, last year’s outstanding kid was a GullahGeechee albino
girl, name of Onyx, wanted a camera so she could explain her life to herself,
that’s not what she said, she said, “I want a camera”, so I got her one.
SITA
Maybe she’s interested in doing the screenplay, if you aren’t, if I can swing
it, wing it?
IDA B
Sita of the Ramayana, a Bolly Sextravaganza, three hours of breast-beating,
chest-thumping, Ravi Shankar Lite, needs some ‘Shimmy Shimmy, CocoPop’, and
what in the world are you thinking, your novel, your novella will drown in
curried cleavage and coconut goo. What screenplay? You do it, be responsible
for your one and only book’s destruction.
SITA
It’s an immediate windfall. Some mad Javanese.
IDA B
And his maddest yen.
SITA
JAVanese, not JAPanese.
IDA B
The Ramayana of Benihana.
SITA
Not my only book, at least in the planning. A memoir.
IDA B
O, please, what are you going to call it – Everybody in the Bloody World Is
Doing a Goddamned Bloody Memoir? As if these pourings-out have any value as
opposed to a work of the imagination.
SITA
Ida B’s Aesthetics 101. Crowded class?
There were all these religions where my mother came from in Kerali -
Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Marxist and I think she expected Marxism to finally
triumph.
IDA B
As it will in the north of London.
SITA
Ah ha, a serious remark, not tripping off some imagined joke.
IDA B
I don’t joke.
SITA
You know what Sigmund says -
IDA B
No, I don’t, but I do know about Marxism. On “You Bet Your Life”, Groucho
asked a mother of fourteen, why so many and she said, “My husband…” and
Groucho said, “I’ve been smoking this cigar for thirty years, but at least I
take it out once in a while.”
You suppose that’s where our last President got his idea?
SITA
Freud lost his lower jaw to cancer of the cigar.
IDA B
He took it out -
IDA B & SITA
Once in a while Once in a while
IDA B
He wore a prosthesis.
SITA
Groucho?
A Bosnian Muslim family of a dozen escaping the charming Serbs, the father
with his prosthesis, the mother about to deliver, holding back, holding forth
on a mule and finally in a tent, this smidgeon pidgeon rests – and without a
pamper, only a whimper.
The screenplay – why not? You have a reputation with your various movie
tie-ins. The notion, the hope, the business plan, the IPO, Indian Public
Offering, is to make an arthouse filmesque Bollyblockbuster.
IDA B
Sort of ‘Crouching Bengal Hidden Python’, I get it.
Why not get Ruth Jabberwocky masquerading as an Indian who writes for the
Ishmael MerchantMelvilles – Portrait of Indya, Passage to a Lady – all that
transparent costume malarkey.
SITA
She who lives in translucent glass lofts shouldn’t – shouldn’t -
IDA B
Some view, ain’t it?
SITA
A monument to tallness.
The money comes to reverse the effects of the dam. People, agencies, keep
giving – thus far.
IDA B
And you keep getting vilified by the politicos.
SITA
The irony comes from some Satya Kutchyerkochdam – ‘dam’ summing up this damn
tootin’ fat bloody Bengali with a giant cockroach -
IDA B (singing)
La cucaracha
La cucaracha
SITA
- in his pants he doesn’t notice as he squirms in delight as three million
people displaced to make way for hydroelectric power – namely rollicking
rupees for the Raj.
My mother felt the Marxism in Kerala; I felt it in the north of London and do
we think that the IRA will really de-commission?
IDA B
Ah, Gerry Adams, one could swing over for a bit of a Guinness toke-’n-poke.
Or we could do our own black-’n-tan, Sita dearest?
SITA
Black ‘n brown, Ida.
IDA B
Dearest.
SITA
This happened last time. Not again. We’re not to neglect the Upanishads.
IDA B
Neglect the Upanishads and the Upanishads will neglect you.
SITA
“Of a certainty the woman who can see all creatures in herself, herself in
all creatures, knows no sorrow.”
IDA B
Ah – Swami – Swama – Yogi – Yoga – BerraGupta – Berra GynoGupta – Berra
GynAH Gupta Ali Obstetra
SITA
“That is perfect.
This is perfect.
Perfect comes from perfect.
Take perfect from perfect, the remainder is perfect.”
IDA B
Perfettamente, chiaro-obscuro. Perfectly clear.
I never said all the things I said. You can look it up.
Look at this – Rush Limbaugh is going deaf?
Now he’ll be deaf AND dumb, deaf a dumb dumb
Pretty soon we won’t hear a thing about him
Pretty soon HE won’t hear a thing about him
May the good Lord on High strike me down dead
In my rush to Rush judgment – here’s O.J.
Me only blapperson who think he did it
Just me and Johnny COCH-RAN of the Walk,
‘Though I should say ‘Talk’, John C in the know
Wherever those bloody gloves go Fuhrman
Will follow
Sexy Fuhrman
Do his badge
Turrettsly sputtering the ‘N’ word
Newt. The man’s name is Newt. Newt. Newt. I mean – Newt.
SITA
Women are named ‘Liz’, but we don’t think of them as lizards.
IDA B.
Lizards Frere, my investment house called the other
and said my Myoonies are gettin’ puny
my money’s being schtupped like a bunny
my Vladivoostock stocks been bonded in bathtub bourbon and the still’s been
destroyed by the Fed who dropped the interest rate bomb for the sixth time
this year and your credit card interest rate has just gone up because we have
to protect the overnight shiftin, the shape-shiftin’ of this ecofreakoconomy Be not alarmed in your tax shelters Curacao
And you folks in your scuba-dive Cayman
You won’t be harmed by the moonshine over Bilbao
‘Cause your Monaco funds hedged by boobula Bros Lehman
Ooo, I like that
What she say what she say
Let’s sound the all-clear ’cause you
Put your faith in the gold standard of Sacajawea
Don’t tell me Lewis and Clark not be diddlin’ dat squaw
You’re a wigwam you’re a teepee
You’re a wigwam you’re a teepee
Not to fear -
SITA & IDA B (simul)
You’re too tents!
IDA BEE
Da Bull going to swipe yore bum
as duh Bear pats his rumtumtum
There’s going to be poetry in your movie?
SITA
Of course. You sound sceptical.
IDA B
I’ve seen these, you’ve taken me to them, they’re all spectacle, and talk
about sentimentality!
SITA
Yes, and that’s unavoidable, but there will be an overlay of Hindi verse,
I’ve been assured and they know not to cross me.
IDA B
They’re the bloody Sikhs -
SITA
Not Sikhs.
IDA B
O. K. , not Sikhs and you shall Finds, but the subcontinental Sopranos,
they’re not going to let you do “poetry”. Or the Sunnis or the Shi’as -
which are the assassins?
SITA
The Shiites. Or at least a sect of which which includes the ‘assassins’.
IDA B
From the word for he who smokes hashish before going off on a bloody rampage,
see, I remember what you teach me, against the infidels or the Sunnis or the
Sonny Sopranos or the Sonny James Caan Godfathers.
SITA
There’ll be an overlay of poetry.
This is from Kedarnath Singh -
“Yes, I am sad; but why
Are you sad, child? What makes you cling
Now like a frightened butterfly
Silent and hushed against my sunless shoulders?
I have done nothing
But give you a name, a small, soft name
Befitting what you are this moment -”
IDA B
And what is she this moment?
SITA
Sunlight.
IDA B
You mean like a left-over-hippie name?
SITA
No, like a Hindi poetry name.
Forget it.
The poetry of your soul extends to The West Wing which ought to be torpedoed
along with the ark.
IDA B
I’m not sure that’s very politic -
SITA
Ibsen said it, Henrik Ibsen, you know the 19th Century Norwegian playwright,
he wrote Hedda “The Suicide” Gabler?
IDA B
Henry Gibson, wasn’t he on “Laugh-In” -
SITA
You would know -
IDA B
Because I’m not turning cartwheels over every line of Wallah SinghSingh or
Rhadamandrath SongSong doesn’t mean -
SITA
Means -
IDA B
The radio said this a.m. that Medan Tagore, somebody, a doctor in India, has
started a laughing
club to relieve stress. Now there are more than 450 laughing clubs across
India.
SITA
And I know you’re not making this up.
IDA B
I’m making all of this up. It’s artifice, remember?
Four hundred and fifty laughing clubs across India.
What do they do when they stop laughing?
SITA
Like wage and price controls? Isn’t that what you said to me? You never stop them. You never stop laughing. You never stop remembering that Richard Nixon put into effect wage and price
controls.
Richard Nixon went to China in 1972. Do you know that the burning question
of the day in the 60′s classrooms was “Should we admit Red China to the
United Nations?”
Now they’re getting the bloody Olympics in 2008.
The runners will die of asphyxiation from the moped fume pollution in Beijing. China calls itself the Middle Country because she thought she was in the
middle of the earth.
and there was this little bit of land to the left of her, or the right
depending where you’re standing, and then there was Japan in the other
direction and that was it for those millennia.years.
IDA
And that was that for last year. No, this year. Like last year. We began a
tradition. Our own private Boise Thanksgiving.
This will be the second annual. The city empties out. Especially down here.
SITA
It’s months away. Don’t count on me. I said I’d go to Kashmir.
IDA B
They have Thanksgiving in Kashmir?
SITA
A Women’s Mission. Relief for women who’ve escaped Kabul.
IDA B
You said you’d be here for Thanksgiving. We’re having fried oysters, unagi,
Tokay Aszu, Bull’s Blood – Egri Bikaver – Paprikash, very Hungarian-Japanese.
SITA
I’ll be in Kashmir.
IDA B
I want you here.
Not Kashmir
I want you pampering me
Kash- schmearing me
changing my diaper, putting a diaper on my head
swabbing me with that mild disinfectant, then drying me -
SITA
Stop.
IDA B
Making me eat more, making me eat everything, kreplach, white fish, being the
HindJew of my dreams.
SITA
I’m cutting off all my hair. I don’t want to be thought of as this pretty
woman who writes novels.
IDA B
Novel. Everyone will see your rather large ears, the only unfortunate part
about you. Let me see if you’re still having your wax problem. It really
prevents your hearing as you should.
SITA
I won’t be here.
IDA B
Alright, I’ll find some other, from Sri Lanka, a Tamil rebel, or a Balinese
tap dancer, a Filipina chacha contest winner, a Shanghai China Doll, a Korean
Seoul sister – I’m prepared to do all of Asia.
SITA
You have a very good start.
IDA B
You are simply not going to Kashmir for Thanksgiving.
SITA
I simply am.
IDA B
They’ll make you wear a chador.
SITA
I have one.
IDA B
You’ve told me.
SITA
How it makes me feel -
IDA B
You’ve told me.
SITA
The chador makes me feel as if I’m an astronaut walking the moon the only
spot that little box across the eyes I can see from
The chador makes me feel as if I’m tiptoeing through cold water with crabs
snapping at my ankles and I need to go faster but I can’t
The chador makes me feel that I’m unable to turn my neck without the burning
of the collar and the roughness across my lips
The chador makes me feel that I’m unable to sway and twist and slink and
stretch and slide and skip and lift this anvil off my shoulders
The chador makes me feel as if
The chador makes me feel that
The chador
The chador
I am accustomed to its smell
IDA B
I thought you said you disposed of it.
SITA
That would have been irreligious. I folded it carefully, like your flag, put
it at the bottom of a trunk with stickers from Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta,
Lahore, Islamabad, Hyderabad, Madras, Kandahar and left it there for these
five years – until the day before yesterday.
IDA B
And you brought it with you.
SITA
Yes.
IDA B
Well?
SITA
Would you like to see it? See it on me? See it on you?
IDA B
Would you like to see me in my Klan robe?
SITA
Do we have enough of a runway? Been practicing your walk? All in the pelvis.
IDA B
ArmaniKlanClad, Versace chadors, Yves Saint-Laurent burkhas down to Manolo
Blahniks covering blood orange toes.
We can model them all on Thanksgiving.
And it will make you feel liberated. Isn’t that the Islamic chic, or is it
sheik, malarkey?
You put this bloody wet blanket, stinking of the rat piss in the caves,
caverns, tunnels their warriors live in when attacked by the British, the
Russians and beyond, scurrying past each other, sinking their toes in shite,
squishing barf as their terror their screaming their advocacy drives them to
and fro,
how do they see each other in the blackness!
and each burpa burka barfa now baptized in the fire of their acid lungs,
because they smoke all the time, rolled yak dung – no – the finest Turkish,
Egyptian, Balkan Sobranies
You put this bloody wet blanket over your tired poor waiting to be huddled
masses yearning to be free and this is your uniform, your stars your stripes
forever
SITA
It is the burka the uniform of bright blue and pale and yellow and black and
white and we walk across the land alongside the craters that the earthquake
has left one hundred feet across and fifty feet deep and some foreigners are
crying across the divide and we can’t understand them they are foreign
journalists and we chant in solidarity with our menfolk and the wind blows
our garments and makes us all tingle and we don’t know where we’re going.
IDA B
We feel no such solidarity, that is for the Polish, who now have come full
circle and the government is without a Solidarnoshch member, Gdansk Gydinia,
does anyone remember the electrician Lech Wawensa who won the Nobel Peace
Prize and Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Russian-trained Polish General who may or
may not have saved Poland from yet another invasion by his supposed
treachery, and now Kofi Annan, Peace Prize winner and before him Henry
Fucknuts Kissinger, marryer of much taller Nancy, she of Rockefeller renown,
a quaint time indeed, and am I not doing reasonably well remembering and
reading what you told me to read?
SITA
Reasonably well.
IDA B
You give me these things to digest and I do and I add my own flourish and I
hope we’ll talk about them but you seem to have other things in mind but I’m
willing interested fascinated to talk about these things because I know you
are willing interested fascinated – just not with me.
SITA
I give you things to read because I want you to know what’s being said.
IDA B
And you think that Law and Order just won’t do it.
SITA
Quite possibly not.
IDA B
Law and Order Special Victims.
SITA
No.
IDA B
Law and Order SPECIES Victims Animals Division.
You think just because I watch this unironic crap, this humorless bilge, this
sanctimonious SHITE, this unforgivably moronic
in-the-guise-of-trenchant-social-commentary NOTHINGNESS that I am not able to
converse, to have a conversation, now what language is that from, to speak
about the fate of our gender?
SITA
The fourth Upanishad – Questions.
IDA B
Prashna-Upanishad. Who in our body wakes, sleeps, dreams, enjoys?
SITA
‘The dreaming mind enjoys its greatness. What it has seen, it sees again;
what it has heard, it hears again; what it enjoyed in different countries and
climates it enjoys again. Whatever is seen, unseen, heard, unheard, enjoyed,
unenjoyed, real, unreal, here and there, it knows; it knows everything.’
IDA B
He called me today, my stepfather. He’s in town to take his daughter back to
school. She’s a freshman in the School of the Arts. He said he had found
some things of my mother’s his wife’s. He had called from Hawaii last week,
saying he was arriving. I never returned the call.
I may see him tomorrow morning, down here some place, I don’t know. He was
there for my mother, as she lay dying, and he protected me from Larry when I
spent my year in bed when I had my very own Guillan-Barre, which I’d gotten
from Larry, or I got something from Larry, and I lay there in hospital,
unable to move anything but my upper lip, and he was there and I thought how
he would just hand my mother money and she and I would shop with these large
bills and pile up large bills on top, and we were free to roam all the 57th
Street stores with their wide aisles and winding staircases and escalators
and Mother and I would share everything, and his money made us, made us feel
free amid the chandeliers and the polished glass everywhere and the warm damp
cloth across my forehead and Larry wanting to see me and I wanting to see my
mother, seen, unseen, heard, unheard, enjoyed, unenjoyed, real, unreal, here
and there, my dreaming mind enjoying its greatness.
SITA
When you lay there, unable to move, save your upper lip -
IDA B
I was anticipating your touch.
SITA
That’s not where I’m going.
IDA B
Whither goest thou over the land and hast thou seen my servant Job?
SITA
This Larry who’s now dead, did you ever forgive him?
IDA B
What of this in the Fourth – ‘The round of day and night is the Creator; day,
life, night matter. Those that couple with a woman by day, waste life; those
that couple by night, preserve it.’
SITA
You should always continue. ‘Those who obey God as Creator, get all that life
and matter can give. Those who practice austerity, continence, veracity go
beyond these into heaven.’
IDA B
‘They that are neither crooked, nor hypocritical, nor lying, go beyond into
pure Heaven.’
Forgive him? No. I am neither crooked, nor hypocritical, nor lying. And did I say that Thanksgiving will be pure Heaven?
SITA
With me or your Tamil Tiger?
IDA B
We’ll save you a spot, a Bengali endangered species leopard spot, under the
table.
SITA
There are no Himalayan snowleopards in India to spare.
Every one must be spared.
IDA B
If not extinct already, like the species of your novel.
SITA
I do have the genus for a second novel.
IDA B
You can’t just stop writing, of course you have the genius, and you’re
probably already hard at it. I can’t stop, even if I wanted to, which I
don’t.
SITA
You’re not a public figure.
IDA B
You are. You’re practically Rushdie. All you need is for the Ayatollah to
issue a fatwa and the jihad against you commences and your second novel is
bought before it’s written.
SITA
The Ayatollah is dead and the concept of ‘jihad’ is misunderstood and the
second, as of now, unwritten novel, has been bought.
IDA B
‘Jihad’ meaning struggle of any sort, personal struggle to attain
excellence-what’s your idea?
SITA
An Anglo-Irish woman, Talaya Dodgson, late fifties, an historian, a movie
critic, a journalist of all sorts, is attending the International Conference
of Women in 1995 in Huai Rou, China fifty or so kilometers outside Beijing.
A sign in the middle of the town says, “Welcome to holiday spot, Huai Rou.
expect everything to turn out as you wish.” And then my personal fave sign -
‘Beijing Cetrified Public Accountants’. It seems Talaya’s grown up all
around the world, as her father was in the foreign Service in Vietnam, Egypt -
IDA B
He was a gentleman spy alongside the French in Indo-China, on a first name
basis with Nasser during Suez -
SITA
You got it. And she’s to deliver a paper on the repression during the
Cultural Revolution 1966-76 in Chairman Mao’s Middle Country, Pol Pot’s
regime in Cambodia and the year zero, Ceausecsu and his Madame in Romania,
Miloshitkevitch and his madame in Serbia – and she has these theories that
every regime is not only anti-women, depsite the various Madames -
IDA B
Madame Chiang Kai-Shek -
SITA
She’s a different story -
IDA B
She was pro-education.
SITA
That’s a key, isn’t it? All these movements are out to destroy people who
have anything but the slightest schooling. Books are evil and those who read
them are the damned.
` IDA B
Then what do we make of God Himself in the Garden of Eden and his warning to
Adam and Eve – Do not eat of the Tree of Knowledge?
SITA
Aha, HIMself, being the first Creationist, would veto any Education Bill and
head the Kansas school board which takes ‘Catcher in the Rye’ off the library
shelves, stomps on it, pisses on it, pours gasoline on it and sends it into
the flames of the Vanities.
But a curious thing happens to Talaya on her way to the Forum.
IDA B
She gets religion.
SITA
Or at least religiosity, though there’s probably no difference. She delivers
the paper as expected and then turns the whole thing on its ear and declares
she’s ready to give witness, the first meaning of the word, ‘martyr’, for
the cause of male superiority. She’s throwing down her education, abjuring
all learning, will suck the toes of bushy-bearded clerics, use the filthiest
turbans for unsanitary purposes and therein lies enlightenment.
IDA B
After all, didn’t Gloria Steinem, after a lifetime of MS’ing, go little-girl
gaga over that billionaire dick?
SITA
Precisely.
And the reader will know that Talaya has just had a conversation with the
Paris Bureau Chief of the New York Times, with whom she’s having an affair,
and she says he has to leave his wife and children and she’ll leave her
husband and son and that they must be with each other as he’s often insisted,
he’s told her that over and over and now he says -
IDA B & SITA
- I didn’t mean it PROACTIVELY!
IDA B
Is there something about you, Sita, Mamacita, mi querida -
Is there something about you, Sita Devi, that wants to declare what Talaya
declares?
SITA reads from the Upanishads.
SITA
“Two birds, bound one to another in friendship, have made their homes on the
same tree.’
IDA B
On the Kilburn High Road.
SITA
“One stares about her, one pecks at the sweet fruit.
The personal self, weary of pecking here and there, sinks into dejection; but
when she understands through meditation that the other – the impersonal Self
- is indeed Spirit, dejection disappears.”
IDA B reads from the same account.
IDA B
“When the sage meets Spirit, phallus and what it enters, good and evil
disappear, they are one.”
SITA reads.
SITA
“We bow down to you, Great Sage!
Bow down to you, Great Sages!”
IDA B
Phallus and what it enters
Doesn’t that just take the bloody cake
Do you remember good and evil disappearing?
Do you remember – of course, it’s been a while -
SITA
I recall.
IDA B
Are you making a distinction between ‘remember’ and ‘recall’?
SITA
You asked about good and evil disappearing -
IDA B
I asked you how long it’s been since you’ve been with a man.
SITA
No, you didn’t.
IDA B
So what? I am now.
SITA
I’m not answering.
IDA B
Then I’ll – tell – you.
SITA
Of me or you?
IDA B
Both. I know both.
SITA
Then why ask?
IDA B
Because I wanted to see if you’d tell me the truth without my prying it out
of you.
SITA
Prying him out of me, more to the point.
Like dogs stuck.
Make it as difficult for yourself as you possibly can.
As difficult as it was for us to part
IDA B
It’s always difficult for us to part.
SITA
We weren’t stuck.
IDA B
You said you were.
SITA
We were.
IDA B
You were; you weren’t.
SITA
I was with him; I wasn’t with you.
IDA B
Last week.
SITA
Correct.
IDA B
Three months ago it was difficult for us to part but we didn’t need to be
pried. I take your point.
SITA
It was difficulty of a different sort. You refused to touch me at all.
IDA B
I refused to touch you!
SITA
You’re correct. It was last week.
IDA B
Middle Eastern.
SITA
An arms dealer.
IDA B
With breath to singe a rhinocerous hide.
SITA
None in the desert. A snake will do, a camel.
IDA B
One hump or two?
SITA
There was barely time for one.
IDA B
I don’t believe you.
SITA
Really. We hadn’t the time.
We sang of arms and the man -
‘Arma virumque cano’
IDA B
I still don’t believe you.
SITA
It’s a classical reference. What’s not to believe?
And yours?
IDA B
I don’t have a classical reference and I’d never lie to you.
SITA
The world is going to hell in a handbasket – what does that expression mean -
and it’s all because of men and we are sparring over whether and when and how
-
IDA B
We haven’t gotten to the ‘how’.
SITA
Well, the ‘prying’ should indicate something -
IDA B
It doesn’t indicate anything, only stuckedness.
SITA
The Chinese have two written characters, one for open, as in turn on, and the
other for close, as in turn off. The two characters written together mean
switch.
IDA B
As in ‘hitter’.
SITA
As in open the door and close the door.
IDA B
Pry, unpry.
We are two characters written together.
We turn each other on, we turn each other off.
SITA
Rarely these days do we do the one together and not the other separately. When I pry, you unpry. The world is going to hell in a handcart, different than a basket, because of
men, and we are sparring over the definition of the word ‘how’.
IDA B
We’ve had a President who defines the word ‘is’ in many different ways,
depending upon his sexual or asexual needs.
We have a President who defines the word ‘Yale’ without the ‘Y’
As Kennebunkport saw your old man catamaran and sail
You slurped the brew from Skull and Bones and drank your way through Yale
Senior had his thousand points of light no new taxes without fail
You couldn’t even read your own lips through a thousand pints of ale
SITA
It’s hard to be President when so many factions disagree with you. It’s easy to be President when everyone agrees with you
IDA B
Fat bloody chance.
And don’t you find coupling with an arms dealer – you, pacifist
extraordinaire, from the spiritual loins of Mahatma G, well, slightly
treacherous, if not treasonous?
SITA
The French actress, Arletty, Film Femme Fatale, in Marcel Carne’s “Children
of Paradise” had an affair with a German major while the Nazis occupied
Paris. After the war, she was brought up on charges of collaborating with
the enemy, treachery, treason, the whole kit. She announced, “My heart
belongs to France, but my ass belongs to the world.”
IDA B
Leni Riefensthal is still a great photographer.
SITA
Albert Speer an innovative architect.
IDA B
Alright, we could do Nazis We’ve Known -
SITA
Fascists We’ve Fucked -
IDA B
It still would not obscure the fact that when you claim to be organizing for
tribal peoples in dam-ravaged southern India you’re schtupping and getting
pried and losing all pride with Mullah Abdullah!
SITA
Pride cometh before the Omar
I was getting money from him, huge chunks, cash amounts, I was appealing to
his sanity and my vanity or perhaps I mean the other way ’round.
IDA B
I think you’re making this up.
SITA
‘Isn’t it pretty to think so.’
IDA B
You said that as if it’s a quote.
SITA
Everything’s a quote, every syllable has already been written and yes, it’s
the last line of “The Sun Also Rises”.
IDA B
“Robert Cone was once middleweight champion of Princeton.”
SITA
That’s the first line!.
IDA B
No bloody fooling, Indian princess.
SITA
Whoa! Never again will I ever -
IDA B
Now that we’ve covered that book, cover to cover -
SITA
One matter we have yet to slam in -
IDA B
I don’t even get to bask in this?
SITA
- an Indian love poem -
IDA B
I love Indian love poems.
SITA
Shutup.
Undertitles if we must
IDA B
Very CNN.
SITA
The final scene of the movie. This is the dying warrior, Sunni Muslim, he’s
been mortally wounded by a Shiite, but says he’s on the mend.
IDA B
Will this end with the chillness of your breast?
SITA
It’ll end with you.
IDA B
Please.
SITA
“I hate this city, seated on the plain
The clang and clamor of the hot bazaar
Knowing amid the pauses of my pain
This month the almonds bloom in Kandahar
“People are kind to me, one more than kind
Her lashes lie like fans upon her cheek
But kindness is a burden on my mind
And it is weariness to hear her speak
“For though that Kaffir’s bullet holds me here
My thoughts are ever free, and wander far
To where the lilac hills rise soft and clear
Beyond the almond groves of Kandahar.”
IDA B
Kaffir – Arabic for infidel
Infidel – Latin for one without faith
Kaffir – the term for South African mineshares
Kaffir – a native of Kafiristan, 1854
Kaffir – the ‘N’ word
SITA
“Wait, cursed Kaffir, wait ’til I come forth
To kill, before the almond trees are green
To raze thy very memory from the north
So that thou art not, and thou hast not been!”
IDA B
Kaffir – Arabic for infidel
Infidel – Latin for one without faith
Kaffir – the term for South African mine shares
Kafir – a native of Kafiristan, 1854
Kaffir – the ‘N’ word
SITA
“Your Kaffir bullet hurts me not a little
Thy Shiah blood might serve to salve the ill
Maybe some Afghan promises are brittle
Never a promise to oneself, to kill!”
IDA B
Screw Kashmir
Be here for Thanksgiving
SITA
Time’s up.
IDA B
No. Miss the bloody plane.
SITA
Just a hop to Boston and back and you’ll be doing your civic duty.
IDA B
Miss the plane
Screw Kashmir
I’ll call the court and plead that I’m a woman
and am not fit because of my gender to serve on a jury.
You are here tonight
You are here the fourth Thursday in November.
SITA
I – am – not.
“Thy gentle love will not disturb a mind
That loves and hates beneath a fiercer star
Also, thou know’st, my heart is left behind
Among the almond trees of Kandahar.”
IDA B
I am the bloody almond trees.
SITA
Like Dickie and Thea poo, they don’t want you in their lives for whatever
reason – good or bad.
Let them go
Let it go
They don’t want you
IDA B
Let me go
SITA
Let me go
IDA B
We don’t just bump into each other’s lives -
SITA
Yes, we do.
IDA B
Like bumper cars at an amusement park
Atoms in a bomb called the Sub-continent
SITA
Yes, we do, and we bump out
IDA B
Bhopal
SITA
GOpal
IDA B
Not your son – Bhopal – the disaster, the catastrophe, the calamity, the
tragedy, Armageddon.
SITA
And they’ll always be.
IDA B
And we’ll always be.
I’m not speaking pro-actively.
How many Upanishads did we get to?
That is, from the original Sanskrit,
‘Sitting at the feet of the master’
‘Como se dice en Espagnol, a sus pies’
SITA
What was your question?
IDA B
I forgot. Your Espagnol is ‘muy poquito’.
How many Upanishads did we get to?
SITA
We got to ‘U’.
IDA B
O.
SITA
‘U’.
IDA B
I -
Will we get to the Koran?
SITA
We get to the Koran.
IDA B
You -
SITA
- Panishad.
IDA B
Speak to me of the Ramayana
Sita, wife of Rama
Namesake of Devi, Bandit Goddess
SITA
I speak to you of renunciation
Ida B, namesake of Wells
Namer of the Projects that will come down
IDA B
Namer of the Projects
SITA
Namer of the Dams
IDA B
Namer of the Dams
SITA
Namer of the Projects
IDA B & SITA
- that will come down
IDA B & SITA
A one and a two
And we all know what to do
IDA B
We began with duelling prologues
SITA
We close with duelling epilogues
IDA B
You see me on the street as we’re passin’
I’m not so awful, though Black, after all
At least I’m not no A-Rab assassin
We’re in this together – at least for the Fall
So white makes right when joined with New Negroes
We’re banded together against all the Wogs
Your Muslim your Persian and all Hindu Ho’s
For their very last meal we’ll make ‘em suck hogs
Whoever be puttin a diaper on his head
Sure Allah is great
We kiss the Koran
Put it down gently
And shoot ‘em all dead
We opposites attract
We’ll bomb Ramadan up to the Pork Age
And any brown skin who calls Buddha ‘Sage’
Because this here’s the time for white and black
Is that what you think?
You got another think comin’
I’m going to put this IOU in my black pocket
‘Cause I comin’ right black achoo
You may think you’re dividing to conquer
But half the sisters these days are named
Tamu el-Islam or Rahman Imani
And that no Eyetalian for clothes from Milan
All those Arundhatis and Tanyas and Yannis
Are calling the shots – down to a man
So this is just one convenience marriage
As soon as the threat has run its course
And it’s clear that Black Beauty’s , well, still a horse
You’ll want her front where she belong pulling your carriage
Whitey’ll hand me the papers and file for divorce
There’s something, let me tell you, so please listen up
It’s not us versus them, runneth over no cup
You got your color, she hers, me mine, ya dig?
No matter what you eatin’, no cow or no pig
Lions and lambs eat couscous and curry
Let’s live and let live, eat drink and be gay
All aboard the new Orient Express, got to hurry
The almond trees blooming in Kandahar
Will show us
Will show us
Will show us the way
SITA
An Ode for an Afghani Mother, Who, upon Arriving at the Name Registration
Office to Change her Sixteen Year Old Son’s Name, with his Permission, from
Mohammed to Smith, Finds the Office Destroyed
To pulverize the terror still at hand
Annihilate the turban and the beard
To strafe and re-strafe every grain of sand
Destroy the camel driver he so feared
The stated goal that “we will end these states”
Who harbor thugs, boxcutter slasher fiends led by bushy-bearded clerics
Who wage ‘jihad’ and spew so many hates with their ‘fatwas’, their hysterics
‘Wanted: Dead or Alive’, not folks but hell-hounds legion
We’ll never do another thing ’til we smite them in their region
One fleeing mom of six in Kabul said
“Afghanis aren’t your enemies, we’re dead
Already, don’t you see our women bashed
By men too whipped to know they’re being lashed
I’ve never had a right to lose or choose
I’m simple, women like me ever use
Whatever paltry nothing we can find
We tend our caves, our huts, our tents, our goat
Our mountains, deserts, unforgiving, blind
Our throats so parched we’ve never seen a boat
Restraining evil’s rage must be your goal
Not setting fires anew in this hell-hole
You can’t bomb us back to the first Stone Age
We’ve never left that pre-Historic page
Uzbeki, Turki, Paki, Kurdi, Tajeki and every other ‘Stan’
These are our homelands, we live how we can”
So volunteer across America
Buy and fly our flags at record rate
For what?, it leads us to Hysterica
And deaths of Sikhs we drive by shoot and hate
Is this what we Americans now mean
To smear the filth of others makes us clean
Reshines our honor, raises towers new
We’re still the many; they are still the few
Towers are Babel speechifying air
We need to sound the All Clear, with a death-defying stare
Why not re-build with eyes of human size
in this great land of the free
Why not NOT bomb and win the human prize
in this great land of the free
IDA B & SITA
The almond trees blooming
Will show us
Will show us
Will show us the way
That’s all they wrote.
