Love Songs for a Lost Continent Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Anita Felicelli.

  FIRST EDITION

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher.

  All inquiries may be directed to:

  Stillhouse Press

  4400 University Drive, 3E4

  Fairfax, VA 22030

  www.stillhousepress.org

  Stillhouse Press is an independent, student-run nonprofit press based out of Northern Viginia and established in collaboration with the Fall for the Book festival.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2017962318

  ISBN-13: 978-1-945233-04-3

  eISBN: 978-1-945233-05-0

  Designed and composed by Douglas Luman.

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

  Love Songs for a Lost Continent

  “This is the book we needed to read yesterday… a book we will still be reading tomorrow.”

  Author of Sick and Sons and Other Flammable Objects

  “Tigers, swans and rampion—Anita Felicelli’s Love Songs for a Lost Continent captures the senses with skillful explorations of sexual being and human vulnerability. This collection not only rallies the imagination; it challenges the intellectual self and the diverse self. A beautifully rendered collection, both enchanting and lyrical.”

  Author of The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals

  “This is a wild, startling collection about loss, migration, colonization, and constantly shifting identities. What does it mean to be an outsider, and where does our power really lie? For the characters in Love Songs for a Lost Continent, living and loving in the margins is as precarious as a tightrope walk.”

  Author of The Pathless Sky

  “Love Songs for a Lost Continent defies expectation. You’ll think you’re being led into a narrative that’s comfortably familiar, but instead will find work that pushes boundaries, redefines freedoms both personal and artistic.”

  Author of Lucky Boy and The Prayer Room

  “Love Songs for a Lost Continent is an expansive, inventive meditation on the shifting landscape of identity, on how people can be shaped and reshaped by violence and power and love. Anita Felicelli has a singular eye for the moments that transfigure lives, and this tremendous debut collection announces the arrival of a stunning new voice.”

  Author of The Third Hotel and Find Me

  “This is the kind of work that we all need to be reading right now. Filled with heart and heat, these beautiful stories pursue and reinvent ideas of home and self in ways that push our national conversation on identity.”

  Author of Pioneer Girl and Stealing Buddha’s Dinner

  “These stories probe the limits of love, the fluidity of home, and the pressures and resistance of women in a patriarchal landscape without ever losing humor, engagement, and a quiet elegance and tenderness. They move with assurance through ideas, themes, and landscapes revealing what is new within what might have been expected. A very strong debut.”

  Author of The Secret History of Las Vegas and The Face, Cartography of the Void

  “The thirteen sparkling pieces in Anita Felicelli’s debut collection grapple with the power of fiction itself: the mythologies handed down to us, the false promises of the American dream, and the stories we don’t recognize we’re telling ourselves.”

  Author of Meantime: A Novel

  For Steven

  DECEPTION

  ELEPHANTS IN THE PINK CITY

  LOVE SONGS FOR A LOST CONTINENT

  HEMA AND KATHY

  SNOW

  ONCE UPON THE GREAT RED ISLAND

  THE LOGIC OF SOMEDAY

  EVERYWHERE, SIGNS

  WILD THINGS

  THE ART OF LOSING

  RAMPION

  SWANS AND OTHER LIES

  THE LOOKOUT

  The only true paradise is paradise lost.

  MARCEL PROUST

  I always had a repulsive need

  to be something more than human.

  DAVID BOWIE

  Sita’s family married her to a Bengal tiger. When her parents had arranged the marriage, she was revolted. To marry a tiger! How loathsome, how base. Was she really so ugly and undesirable that the only interested suitor was a beast?

  Nonetheless, reluctant and angry and ashamed, she’d followed him to his home at the edge of the village. But to her surprise, Anand was resolutely romantic, so unlike the boys in her engineering college. He recited poetry, and his pursuit of her was focused and thoughtful. He read the books she recommended, even the British murder mystery novels, discussing why the clues didn’t quite add up or marveling at the skillfulness of the author’s plotting. They attended outdoor movies every Saturday night, eating popcorn and drinking Thums Up cola at the intermission and sitting in the back, out of sight of the gossipers.

  After the tiger was murdered, newspapers across India branded Sita a killer, and all the charm fell away from her memories of those early courtship days. Everyone claimed they knew what had happened. At parties in the neighboring state, raconteurs and conspiracy theorists drunk on cashew feni would put forth detailed hypotheses on why she’d done it and how, describing all manner of bloody horrors. In the village streets, the wallahs gossiped about the latest clues being considered in the police investigation. Grandmothers spent long languid afternoons sipping tea and munching on vada, and although they started with the best of intentions—talking about their children’s marital problems and shaking their heads with sighs of ayyo—eventually the conversation would turn to what sort of family Sita must have had, to marry her to a tiger, and what sort of family the dead tiger must have had, to marry him off to a Brahmin girl. Environmental groups called for the death penalty. The shame Sita had forgotten about returned.

  ***

  It was a clear Friday morning in March when a neuroscientist loaned his Smriti 3000 fMRI lie-detection machine to the police department in Sita’s village. Jacaranda trees in front of the hospital’s double doors were blooming, their mauve canopy of blossoms thick and sweet. Beneath the trees, the fallen flowers were nearly reflective, shimmering purple in the light that bleached the gravel road. The Smriti 3000 arrived in two parts: the first was a human-sized computer that needed to be lifted by five heavyset men, and the second was a cylindrical MRI machine with its trail of sensors like red roses on floppy rainbow stems. It was an oracle made of metal, fit for the modern age, and it occupied the hospital room with its cheap Formica-topped desk and black rotary telephone with all the phony confidence and ostentation of a slot machine.

  Dr. Kumaraswamy, the neuroscientist who had invented the machine, appeared at the hospital twenty minutes after the machine arrived. He was small and frail with wide grey-brown lips and long narrow nostrils. He walked with an engraved silver walking cane, which he employed liberally to admonish people who irritated him.

  “Careful! I say, careful, you bloody moron!” he shouted at the young man trying to follow his directions on how to attach the sensors to the young woman’s head.

  He spent several hours training all of the hospital technicians and a few police officers on how to record Sita’s responses and how to play the interrogation tapes he had compiled to question her.

  Senior-ranking police officers watched Dr. Kumaraswamy with a mixture of resentment and admiration. Resentment because he was a doctor trying to usurp their role of ferreting the truth from recalcitrant subjects—and admiration because they believed medicine was the most noble of professions. However cumbersome, however much it jeopardized their jobs, the machine had the potential to ensure that the most elusive and dangerous suspects in India were put away forever or sentenced to death.

  Fifty thousa
nd times stronger than the earth’s magnetic force, Dr. Kumaraswamy explained. “This is the strongest machine of its kind.”

  “How does it work?” one of the officers asked.

  “It sends radio waves into the suspect’s body,” the doctor said. “And knocks the protons out of line, then reads the signals released by the protons. See these? The protons in the areas where the oxygenated blood flows produce the strongest signals.”

  Two police officers and the commissioner hovered around him.

  “Are you sure it works?” one of them asked.

  “Yes, absolutely,” the doctor said.

  “You know about the woman we have here?” the commissioner asked. He tapped a shiny black billy club on the table. “Are there any precautions we should take, doctor?”

  “None, unless she’s pregnant or wearing an intrauterine device,” he replied.

  “Not a problem, doctor,” the commissioner said.

  “Then the technician will hook her up. And the computer will tell you if she’s lying.”

  Sita’s lawyer arrived to represent her during the interrogation, but he said nothing as wires were fastened to Sita’s head. He was a tall man who wore a crisp button-down shirt and spoke with a British accent even when he was speaking Tamil. Although he had been born in Madurai, he’d studied in England from a young age, and he’d returned to India “to do good.” He said this without even the slightest hint of wit or amusement.

  One of the police officers stood outside the room, his thick arms crossed and his head tilted slightly to listen. The tape played a series of sentences. The machine was humming as it measured the way the young woman’s brain responded to them. Bored, the commissioner and the other police officer went downstairs to eat at the cafeteria. The young woman squirmed inside the MRI machine. Bang, bang, bang. The gong-like pulses after each question were so loud they could be heard down the hall.

  “Keep still,” the technician said.

  She wiggled her toes in defiance. The technician took a pamphlet and thwacked her toes with it. She gave one last half-hearted kick and stilled.

  A proper voice with a British accent continued to state sentences, each of them short and declarative, together forming a black web of her misdeeds, both real and imagined. The technician paced uneasily back and forth in front of the machine to make sure there were no errors, while the officer and Sita’s lawyer took notes. The officer scratched his notes in longhand in a spiral-bound notebook. Sita’s lawyer hunted and pecked on his laptop with a bony index finger. Inside the white tunnel of the machine, Sita closed her eyes and tried to remember the city of pink palaces, the rosy homes of kings and their consorts, as the voice told her a tale about her husband’s death.

  ***

  I bought arsenic from the shop.

  The voice on the tape was a polite, confident woman’s voice. As it uttered the shaky narrative investigators had pieced together, the machine registered that a quiet territory of Sita’s brain was whirring, responding to the words:

  I poured arsenic in the batter.

  I walked to the bus stop.

  I took a bus to Srinivasan’s house.

  I had planned the murder in the weeks before.

  Srinivasan knew about the murder.

  We took the rickshaw to the train station.

  It was strange how the phrases were worded, as if the proper-sounding voice was meant to be a stand-in for her own husky one. She wasn’t quite sure what the Smriti 3000 measured, but she’d gathered from the technician’s chitchat with her lawyer that a part of her brain lit up to tell the technician that she had a memory of the sentence being uttered, that it was not an alien thought, but one that comfortably wedged into her mind like the teenage summers spent lounging on the colored sands of Kanyakumari with her brothers or the cheap mystery novels she read. And hearing the sentences, she was persuaded. After all, she had wanted the tiger dead. She’d grown repulsed by him, her contempt born from overfamiliarity.

  But during a break, she complained privately to her lawyer that she didn’t actually remember what the machine said she remembered. Her lawyer suggested that perhaps she had blacked out the truth. “People don’t always know the truth about themselves or what’s happened to them.” He said this with no hint of emotion, as if it were simply information, not necessarily applicable to her situation. When she raised her eyebrows, he assured her this wasn’t what he told the prosecutors. Confusion and loneliness swirled through her.

  The technician shepherded her back into the eerie white tunnel of the MRI. The voice and the booming sounds commenced again. She kept her eyes closed.

  Outside the Smriti 3000, electrical signals zinged from the colorful wires attached to her shaved scalp and ran to the large computer where they spit out their results. “EXPERIENTIAL KNOWLEDGE” said the screen in big red letters, a proclamation of truth.

  I did not care that my husband had died.

  The voice stopped.

  “What happened?” asked Sita as the technician pulled her from the tunnel. “What does that mean?”

  The technician administering the test nodded. He unclipped the sensors from Sita’s head and gestured at the truth printed on the screen.

  “But it’s wrong,” she said.

  He didn’t respond.

  The technician gave her a gel to clean the stickiness from her head. It was still horrifying to her to feel the bristles of her hair emerging on her scalp, so similar to Anand’s whiskers—prickly, tiny needles spearing her fingertips. Her hair had once been so long, it had extended the full length of her spine, a luxurious cascade of black curls. She hadn’t cut it since her schooldays, though she trimmed the ends occasionally. She was ashamed of her vanity now.

  Her lawyer shook her hand, and hurried off to his next client. He was absolutely sincere in everything he said, and she knew she was supposed to trust him because he’d studied at Cambridge and came so highly recommended, but all she could feel was dismay that her life was now in the hands of some British man who didn’t even know how to make jalebis, who didn’t understand it was preposterous to think she could pour rat poison into the batter and not have the finished product taste toxic. Anand would have known straightaway something was wrong. In fact, he probably would have beaten her for making jalebis incorrectly. He’d hit her for less in the past, his claws raking her face. The villagers all knew how he treated her, but they met their knowledge with silence.

  ***

  It would have been more bearable if Srinivasan had visited her in jail, if he had wanted to wait for her.

  For months before the tiger’s death, she’d been seeing Srinivasan during long, lazy afternoons. He was a literature professor at a local college. She met him at a reading by a foreign author one weekend in January. They both had read the book before the reading and brought their copies of the book to be signed, but afterward, during the book signing, he whispered he hadn’t been satisfied with the ending, and since she too was dissatisfied, they invented other more exciting endings—the butler was actually a killer! No, the butler had been on holiday and the maid set him up to take the fall.

  After the author had signed Sita’s copy, Sita was ready to leave, but Srinivasan was waiting for her outside. They strolled through the muddy village streets, keeping their bodies a modest few feet apart, before leaving each other with long looks and promises to meet again the next afternoon. Anand was angry with her for coming home late, but at least he hadn’t thrown anything. He lolled on the carpet in front of the television as he watched a game show, growling as the man he hoped would win was eliminated. He rolled over on his back and stretched his limbs, exposing his white furry belly, and then flipped back over again, licking his paws.

  It was so satisfying to clean the tiny house during the morning while Srinivasan taught his literature courses. It was so satisfying to leave for a leisurely walk on the beach with her lover—even the word “lover” was thrilling, perhaps partly because of the breathtaking danger and the ter
rible consequences if the tiger found out, but she did not admit that thought. It was too dark, too disturbing, too complicated.

  She and Srinivasan would spend hours wandering between driftwood and wet ribbons of olive-green kelp, dodging the low black cloud of flies that buzzed up from rough sand. Cow dung and cowrie shells. Closer to the water, the sand was packed, icy smooth. They would stand knee-deep in the waves, feeling the fierce rush of it returning to the ocean, the salty white foam like gentle soapsuds around their toes.

  Srinivasan wore his straight dark hair so that it fell just above his shoulders. He would tell her stories about his class, advising her on books to read to improve her vocabulary and her familiarity with Anglo literature. He would run a finger around the curve of her cheek, look deeply into her eyes. It was like something out of an American movie where people believed they were soul mates.

  His kisses tasted like fresh mint and sweet-bitter fennel seeds, rather than blood and fresh meat. His mother was Punjabi and he was an excellent cook, claiming his proficiency arose from his long-term bachelor status. He would invite her to his house for succulent curries and naan and freshly fried samosas. There was something intoxicating in their connection, consisting as it did almost entirely of delicious food and literature. She’d been taught her whole life that a Tamil woman should be devoted to her husband, should cook and clean and serve him. But in books, in movies, there was romance, and although most people she knew were driven by obligation, her own sense of romance—that it tossed you out on the edge of a cliff, just waiting to fall, that it shook you through and through like a violent earthquake—was vastly more powerful than her sense of duty.

  And when he asked her to run away with him to Jaipur, the Pink City, because he’d accepted a job there, she said yes immediately, thinking of fairy tales, thinking of the intricate facades of the palaces she’d seen only in friends’ vacation pictures, thinking that all she wanted was to escape her village, escape the people with whom she’d long since stopped identifying.