Chocolate Cherry Chai Read online

  CHOCOLATE

  CHERRY

  CHAI

  CHOCOLATE

  CHERRY

  CHAI

  TASLIM BURKOWICZ

  ROSEWAY PUBLISHING

  An imprint of Fernwood Publishing

  HALIFAX & WINNIPEG

  Copyright © 2017 Taslim Burkowicz

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.

  Editing: Sandra McIntyre

  Design: Tania Craan

  Printed and bound in Canada

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  Published by Roseway Publishing

  an imprint of Fernwood Publishing

  32 Oceanvista Lane, Black Point, Nova Scotia, B0J 1B0

  and 748 Broadway Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3G 0X3

  www.fernwoodpublishing.ca/roseway

  Fernwood Publishing Company Limited gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of Manitoba, the Province of Nova Scotia and Arts Nova Scotia.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Burkowicz, Taslim, 1978-, author

  Chocolate cherry chai / Taslim Burkowicz.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-55266-962-4 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-55266-963-1

  (EPUB).--ISBN 978-1-55266-964-8 (Kindle)

  I. Title.

  PS8603.U73776C56 2017 C813’.6 C2017-903114-7

  C2017-903115-5

  To my mother, Naseem Sherif, who taught me how to tell stories, the old fashioned way: no paper, no pens.

  To my father, Zahoor Sherif, who taught me used books make the very best gift.

  The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

  — Albert Einstein

  1

  SEVEN A.M. I WAS looking out at the grey sea through gauze curtains that hung like strips of surgical bandages from the open window. During high tide, the ocean covered every doorstep of the beachfront buildings. Waves came crashing right up against my hotel wall, and when I looked outside, it felt like I was not in a rented room but on a boat at sea.

  Could this be a place I called home for good? A few months ago I was looking out at the crystal blue waters of Okinawa wondering the same thing. Then it was Saipan, Thailand, and, before that, Bali. I’d been to the Philippines three times — that should have counted for something. But it didn’t. Everywhere started to look the same after a while: the same teal tide washing over the sand, the same receding shoreline.

  Shoving on a mesh trucker’s hat, I abandoned the hammock to wet towels, Roxy t-shirts, and a water-stained copy of Anna Karenina. Putting thoughts of Russian aristocrats behind me, I walked down to the dive shop to set up the tanks for the morning dive. The ocean would fill quickly with European, Australian, Japanese, and American tourists, men mostly, their heads jerking up and down in the waves as they yelled excitedly to one another about sharks. At night, they jammed themselves into loud coast-side bars, drinking and comparing jellyfish wounds. Later still, the men disappeared into girlie bars guarded by black curtains and round grandmothers charging admission for entry.

  I headed a group of divers onto the boat, introducing them quickly to the boatmen. Fat, warm drops of rain fell into the sea — crocodile tears threatening a storm that would never materialize. Despite the disturbance on the surface, underwater, the ocean was a settled glass bauble. Sinking slowly, I measured the descent with my white dive watch. With each metre, every worry I had diminished, and I entered a world where the waves on the surface were only shadows rippling on the ocean bed.

  Hovering in the sea, my hair swirling around me, I pointed toward coin-sized fish darting in and out of undersea highways, parking themselves inside pink sponge skyscrapers. Sunlight cut through the Pacific in slices. The water was clear and blue, like a rare coloured diamond.

  My job was to lead three Australian men on the dive course. Earlier, I had mapped out a route on the whiteboard in the shop. But now I zoned out, coasting along with the current, my arms folded in front of me, tapping into the power of my plastic fins. I moved like I belonged here, needing only a few weights to keep me hovering just above the sea bed. For every ten metres we dived, the effects were similar to drinking one martini, and right now we were cruising at about twenty-five metres deep.

  I smiled, my surroundings surreal. I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone had jumped out from behind a sea fan and told me everything I was seeing was a hologram, all part of some virtual program. That really, I was home at a computer console, plugged in.

  In the water, everything made sense. Maybe this is what doing heroin felt like: a seemingly never-ending warm bath. A tranquil dream where things floated by me, and I floated by them, uninterrupted. Aqua green triggerfish. Peach corals. Sea turtle. Moray eel. Squid’s iridescent rainbow tentacles pumping.

  Sucking air in through the regulator, I was suddenly alerted to the sound of metal hitting rocks. A boat anchor. Snapping out of my reverie, I looked to make sure my three Australians were still behind me. They were chugging along steadily, heavy weights wrapped around their barrel-shaped torsos. I pointed to a wall filled with colourful nudibranch, fantastic patterns splayed across their micro bodies. The men nodded briskly under the water, pulling out their specialty cameras to take a shot. If they were pissed a chick with hot pink nails and not some burly man had taken them out for the day, it was impossible for them to say so. On the last dive of the day, we went to Shark Caves. As expected, the men were impressed by the harmless nurse sharks, and I felt proud that I, a mere girl, had brought them there.

  When we returned to shore, the Australian divers glistened in the late afternoon sun like three wet penguins. The Filipino boat boys hoisted tanks onto their sunbaked shoulders — the perfect backdrop for the vacation pictures the Aussies would print out later. It donned on me that one day I, too, would be just a glossy, flat copy of myself in my twenties, slipped into someone’s photo album. By now my superpowers as a dive leader had vanished, for the magical world I’d showed the men was gone. In fact, I was not even strong enough to help lift the tanks from the boats into the shop.

  Grudgingly, the Aussies shook my hand.

  “Would you like to join our crew fo’ dinnah?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “You’ll have a good time, won’t cha, mate?”

  They were here for three things only: drinking, diving, and debauchery. To the untrained eye, this might have looked like a pick-up attempt, but with my university education, meticulous gold hair streaks via a Tokyo salon, and solid smile courtesy of Canadian dental coverage, they had dubbed me a Western broad — a waste of time to pursue.

  The Australian men left their wetsuits in a soggy pile. I hosed each one down, stretching them onto hangers. Padding up the narrow staircase behind the hotel that led to my room, I waved to my landlady. Her boy cried out, scratching his face. Sometimes the three of us went for walks, looking for seashells left behind by the tide. The landlady looked after the boy for a German man and his Filipina wife, now living abroad. In the mornings I saw her on the porch brushing out his tangled hair. In the evenings, he slept on her lap while she spat sunflower seeds bought from the sari-sari shop. For the first time in my life, I wanted a son of my own. Maybe the locals and their f
amily ways were finally getting to me.

  I showered to wash away the relentless smell of the ocean, applying cocoa butter lotion and mascara, and left it at that. The flecks of burnt umber in my honey-coloured eyes flickered under my tan. Within a couple of hours my straight hair would dry into a frizzy mane and I would look like a deranged jungle cat, but what to do? You didn’t take a hair dryer on a dive vacation. I put on a three-dollar bikini under my halter top and shorts and ventured out.

  Immediately, my sandals sank into wet, grey sand.

  “Maya!” Gracie called from her shop. In Puerto Galera, the coastal strip was a long line of conjoined shops and restaurants. At Gracie’s, different-sized terracotta pots lined the shelves, ready to be sold as last-minute souvenirs. If there was ever a workshop where God made Adam and Eve, it would smell like this, a combination of soil, clay, and the sea.

  “I have something for you,” she said, holding out a wooden statue.

  Tiny, angry Gracie was known for knocking on doors in the night to see if her husband, an Aussie expat, was inside. She had left her first husband, a Filipino man who had squandered the family’s savings, in a drunken heap of tequila and urine in Manila. Gracie’s new man seemed decent — he paid for her children’s education — but she would still snatch a tourist’s camera to search for evidence of him in a compromising position. For some reason she found me no threat.

  “It’s beautiful. Is it like a matryoshka doll?” I asked, cautiously. Gracie scared me. Once she forced me to feel the stab wounds on her stomach from a mugging in Manila. As I rested my fingertips against the silvery scar puckering her bronze skin, I could almost hear the motorcycles gunning in the distance and see the men circling her, sharp sticks in their hands.

  “It’s a fertility doll,” she explained, flipping open its centre to show me the smooth, hollow innards. “You write how many children you want on paper, put it in the doll, and poof! Your dreams come true. You need this more than anyone. So I am pulling it from the shelf to give to you … for free!”

  I stared at the wooden doll in my hands: mouth agape, hands clasping its face in agony. Another insult disguised as a compliment. Desperate, poor, single me. I was only twenty-six, but in the Philippines I felt forty.

  I thanked Gracie, and walked to the seaside restaurant next door, where I ordered a mango shake. I placed the straw next to the doll’s giant hula-hoop mouth. Behind me, two men talked loudly as they stampeded into the restaurant. I turned and saw Pete and Fred. How much partying were they doing that they had to wear their hotel keys around their necks?

  “Mind if we join you?” Without waiting for an answer, Pete plopped himself onto the bamboo chair beside me. An American living in Korea, he had produced a son with one of the locals. Now he was an out-of-towner who visited on summer vacation.

  He pointed to the doll. “What’s that?”

  “A gift,” I said, placing it on my lap.

  Losing interest, Pete turned to the laminated menu card.

  “We’re going to the bar to do shark shots after this,” said Fred, an American pilot living in Vietnam. He leaned into the bar, his giant belly dividing into two halves against a chair. “If you drink five shots, you win a shirt.”

  I looked at Fred’s t-shirt — Proud Pilot. Ask me for a V.I.P. tour of my cockpit — and secretly wished him luck.

  Pete replied for me in a voice I imagined he might use with his son. “She has a dive tomorrow. She needs her rest.”

  “Ah, well, she fancies herself a cut above the rest.” Fred added two packets of sugar to his tropical drink and stirred crazily.

  I bulldozed their elbows clear of my menu. “Being mashed between you guys is not my idea of a good time.”

  “You have no idea how fucking dangerous it was for me to walk around customs with a baggie filled with compressed green leaves, you guys. If I know one thing from my last trip, it’s there’s no fucking mint leaves in Puerto Galera. Look at these beauts!” Fred held up the fuzzy greenery as proof. “These are in mint-condition. It’s mojito time!”

  I ate my penne arrabiata quickly. Pete and Fred. Brian and Jim. Dave and Steve. There was a pair of these guys everywhere I went diving in Asia.

  I wanted to sit on the beach, but at low-tide the sea left behind drifter crabs and seaweed wigs, so I decided to go for a walk. I made my way toward the locals’ houses, where someone’s backyard always turned into someone else’s front yard. Cement squares zigzagged with clotheslines. A rooster strutted here and there. Home-cooking wafted through open windows. I stepped over the muddy runoff pouring down the roads from clothes being hand-washed in yards. Stray dogs meandered through windowless, doorless shops. Everything on the strip was left to be cleaned by the open-air, so at five in the morning you could walk right in and take a seat at a restaurant. I stepped past the shops selling sinus decongestion medicine in single tablets to dive instructors desperate to clear colds fast. A gang of boys smiled at me. Tomorrow they would shout “Balut! Balut!” outside my window. They were wasting their time: I would never eat the partially developed egg delicacy.

  I walked until I reached Turtle Egg Café and sank into a cubicle with dial-up internet to check my messages. A typical email from my mother, the sentences punched together like a telegram: Come home. Meet a nice boy. Get married. No more travelling! Love you!

  My mom thought no worthy man would want a wanton gypsy who had collected more travel stories than cooking skills, while I was sure I would meet my dream man in a romantic setting involving sand dunes or Red Sea diving. Watching The English Patient on repeat did nothing to disabuse me of the fantasy. We would share a bottle of red on a cement balcony hole-punched with Arabic designs, while below us people scurried about in Egyptian cotton head pieces and embroidered shawls. The air would be heavy and smell perpetually of sour wine, red chilies, and dark chocolate. We would discuss world politics by day and go dancing by night. Mom said as long as she had been living, a perfect man had never fallen from the sky. She also said good Indian girls did not have escapades in the Arab world. Travelling in excess was for nomads and escaped convicts.

  The café was empty, except for the two sisters who ran the operation and a male diver with a rucksack. I stepped outside, breathing in the balmy night air. It was getting dark. Neon lights were turning on and humming, reminding me of the buzzing cicadas of Tokyo in summer. The odd dive shop would be taking customers out for a night dive, but most boatmen would be dragging the tanks back into the shops, leaving long, deep tracks in the moist sand that would still be there come morning.

  A breeze caught the fertility doll and her belly unclipped. If I believed in signs from the universe, this would surely be one. A patch of the ocean was visible from anywhere on the island and I caught a heart-shaped piece of it now, denim blue and shimmering, framed between two storefronts. Two girls walked by, giggling, their arms laced. Wearing the heady combination of perfume and hairspray, they were on their way to the girlie bars. There, a mamasan would negotiate customers for the girls to entertain. I had seen the tall one with Fred every morning. When they were together, he looked like a billiard ball, she, the matching cue.

  I saw my friend Lulu, probably on her way home from one of the hotels, a basket of essential oils in her arms. Lulu was proud to give massages with “nothing extra.” She had four children, her eldest fathered by an American soldier who sailed back home after proposing, never to be heard from again. Lulu claimed mixed children were accepted on the island, but she wouldn’t deny her boy was teased. After her scandal, Lulu married a local Filipino. Now, she spouted this mouthful of wisdom for the Filipina girls: “Don’t get pregnant with these diseased foreign men! No one wants you after you have another man’s baby. I just got lucky.”

  I sidestepped some gutters. Mixed in with the trash were crumpled bundles of tissue-white kittens, covered in fleas. Their eyes were filled with a milky substance and glued shut with yell
owed pus.

  “Maya, how many times did I tell you not to touch those kittens?” Lulu snapped. “I have something for you.”

  “Why is everyone giving me gifts?”

  “I heard about that crazy Gracie and her gift. But I am going to give you something more useful than some hocus-pocus doll.”

  We walked up to Blue’s closed dive shop, where the giant mural of sharks and sea turtles glowed garishly under the moonlight. In the day, Blue’s shop was the best place on the island to hang out. Dolly kept cold drinks on hand for anyone who swung by, and all the divers gathered on the steps to talk about sharks, parties, and enriched air diving. Lulu swept sand from the step, motioning for me to sit. She reached into her coral reef sweater, a tourist shop special, and pulled out a deck of cards.

  “You’re giving me cards?”

  “What? No, no!” She laughed uncontrollably, looking ten years younger. “Mad Gracie gives you a magical statue, and you think I will give you a pack of cards? Pa! I am doing tarot cards. I will tell you your future.”

  I raised a skeptical eyebrow. “My future?” She looked hurt, so I smoothed back my unruly hair and held out my palms. “Where will I live in five years?”

  She pushed my hands away irritably, spreading the cards over a cloth blanket. “I am not using your hands. And I specialize in matters of love. Pick a card.”

  I hesitated. My hand wavered over the spread deck. I wished I knew more about card reading. Was my fate already determined, or did choosing a card determine it? Would picking a card closer to me mean I would meet the love of my life sooner? Or perhaps I shouldn’t think at all and choose a card at random, allowing love to hit me spontaneously.

  A loud guffaw from a group of foreign men around the corner startled me, and my hand dropped onto a card in the middle.

  “That’s the one!” Lulu pushed my fingers away, plucking the card. Her thumb and forefinger flicked the corner tip so it made a snapping sound, like fresh linen placed on a hotel bed.