the foyer or exhibit for travelers

reema rajbanshi

CATALOGUE 1 

Assamese items. 
Present-day Northeast India. 
Pre-colonial — early 21st c. 

1. Loom 

A wide device with which one weaves, a loom may be found in traditional Assamese homes. 

Colorful thread runs the length of this loom, which should open, when you move behind it, like a baleen whale’s mouth. Imagine a xylophone of threads at your fingertips. Imagine a gauzy filter between your gaze and the world’s. Can you maneuver the foot pedals, the shuttlecock in steady rhythm? A cloth will manifest before you, from a red-and-white gamoosa (see #3) to a flower-bordered shawl (see #4). 

I can’t use a loom, though I was allowed to try on visits to Assam, which my father purchased for my mother and me (1981, 1992, 1996): as a newborn, then a child, then a teen. Young women who couldn’t use a loom had grown up in the city, usually middle-class too. 

My pen on paper is a loom. I weave this house for those locked out of houses in other countries and their own. Can you find the blanket (minimalist, the way Peha preferred) slung over this loom? Only Peha and, years later, another uncle ever visited the U.S. (see “The Deck or Decades 1, 2, 3, 4”)(i). Does this loom transport you somewhere you too can locate on a map?

2. Mura 

A stool woven out of bamboo, the mura is lightweight, taupe, and popular for Assamese porches, rooms, and in-between spaces. 

One sits lower than others on this humble furniture that is humbling. My parents, when hosting 80s and 90s parties for Assamese friends or travelers, often sat on muras while guests sat on couches. (They had many guests when they were young and energetic, fewer when their guests curried seats with rich families post-millenium.) I wish I could buy my parents something other than muras and fickle guests. 

I will fill the foyer with muras for the dead. Peha had liked to sit on the stoop, toasting his hands over wood coals. Rubul Dada, who had liked to flit about, might’ve shuffled a mura over to the circle of the moment. Borah Uncle would’ve moved the mura to the drawing room, preferring to sit formally like my father, his college buddy. 

My child-self loved muras in the courtyard, placed closer to the garden than to the gate. 

That’s where she felt like a theater guest, as women washed and hung clothes on a line or gathered to reminisce, tending to each other with keen eyes and lips. In which room of this house would you place your mura? 

3. Gamoosa 

A red-and-white cloth, the gamoosa typically runs the length of one’s body, sometimes two, but is always a cotton swatch. In the ruins of some Anthropocene dig, a sweaty intern will tweeze up edges of this plain cloth, cataloguing it as body (ga) and wipe (musa). 

I grew up with gamoosas hanging from hooks and doorknobs. We wiped our hands and faces on gamoosas, wrapped them about our bodies if a towel were missing, mopped up errant spills with them. I’ve inducted unwitting boyfriends into my unknown culture when they’ve dried bathroom hands on gamoosas. I’ve packed gamoosas across continents, learning it did not matter if they were stained or torn or threadbare. Travel did not diminish their utilitarian beauty.

Though I wave no flag, the gamoosa is closer to one than the gun, the rhino, the muga, or anti-Bengali fervor. It is a signpost in so many homes I’ve passed through: Assamese, Bengali, Hindu, Muslim, tribal. I didn’t understand the gamoosa as political until the early aughts, when I’d wrap my wet hair in it, then was stopped at the grocery by an Arab lady asking if I was Palestinian.

The gamoosa lands naturally in outer space, where one Assamese/American woman’s husband floated up with it in 2019, garlanded. 

4. Shawl

Crimson wool rectangle embroidered with aged gold thread, which forms a lacy border and gold stars that burst across the swath. I’ve hung this heirloom, gifted from my Communist grandfather to my social worker mother to artsy me, across the many walls I’ve lived between in two decades of moves.

Ata had bought the shawl in the 70s for my mother, who said she’d never wear such a bright red.

She recounted this offhandedly, maybe knowing I loved red, maybe as a way to ease her gifting thirty years later. I’d asked hesitantly if I might have it, as I’d asked for the red-and-white flower ring my grandfather had gifted for my mother’s wedding.

Ata, did you know that shawl would end up with me, the granddaughter you joked had the spunk of a boy? Ata, were you with me those times I hung the shawl in recent home offices (asking for protection) and that time I hadn’t (and dealt with work fuckery)? Were you with me when I lost that ring and asked you to help me recover it, which I did?

Imagine carrying this shawl as a thin way to feel like you have covering, in an adult life where you feel unmoored in a bright-white country, your childhood family splintered.

5. Knives, Spears, and Other Weapons 

Outsized. The knives are as long as your arm with thick handles that look made for clenched fists, with broad blades that might slice children if dropped. Have you seen anything similar in American houses that demanded defending? Have you seen children play with such knives in foyers? Though I’ve never witnessed anyone sliced, I’m sure, from tales of AFSPA and ULFA and SULFA(ii), many have been. 

There will be elegant spears with tribal tufts, probably red-black-and-white because Naga colors are most familiar. The spears will be ornamental, as they are in my parents’ home, stored in a traditional jar my mother brought from Barpeta, where they specialize in brassware. My maternal family is non-tribal yet my mother keeps the spears in her hometown jar and I explain Assamese identity thus. Moveable mix: spears beside jar, spears pointed down in jar, broken spears in scratched jar. I refuse, after my 2003 trip, to imagine my foyer without both. 

All these weapons might fit in this jar, even rifles I’ve seen touted in party pics. Perhaps I’m writing about a future jar in which I put away my weapons: mace, claws, grudges. This will be a shining container taller than the television and myself, transforming my hodgepodge foyer into something ferocious and ancient. 

6. Xorai 

A xorai may be brass or wood, meaning as colorful as us. Designed in halves—the top conical with a spire, the bottom a circular table—the top is removable, the bottom a base that holds prayer items like the Gita. 

Xorais are one of my earliest objects, before a doll, a pen, a mug, or a visa. Before I knew 30% of ethnic Assam was Muslim, I associated Oxomiya with naams, when we gathered round New Jersey xorais to sing and pray. Inconspicuous in corners, xorais guard the homes of my parents’ friends and relatives, my parents’ village childhoods in Tihu and Howli. In tourism posters of Assam, a gamoosa lies across a xorai’s base and maroon betelnuts with paste are arranged on leaves, cone off.

A Jewish man I no longer meet—our decade-plus friendship burst when he chose my sister over me—described the small xorai I gifted him after my 2003 trip as indigenous. I wonder what his girlfriend—an Afro-Caribbean woman who supported Palestine (when he did not) but questioned my friend-time with him—made of that descriptor.

I will keep a xorai in my foyer as a reminder that circles can break and come together again, that we greet each other in a room of ritual objects. 

CATALOGUE 2

Bronx items.
Present-day New York City, United States. 
Mid-20th c. — early 21st c. 

1. Garden Hose

Hoses, like hydrants, are everywhere in the Bronx. But a hydrant is fixed to the street whereas a hose extends as far as you can drag it: garden, gate, even the foyer. Children can maneuver a hose, can delight in it as much as in a hydrant on a sweltering August day. They gleam under the splash.

My father taught us to hose the backyard garden of our 80s Bronxwood Avenue house. He tended a horseshoe of spinach, tomatoes, and squash, their green tumult a sign of the way his fingers had pulled life from soil. Whereas we were enthusiasts of water torture, bending leaves with spray, adjusting the valve to test how much the plants could bear, then shrieking and spinning at dusk.

Having retired in the pandemic, my father hoses down the driveway of his Pelham Parkway South house. He will creak open the garage doors, unloop the hose from its cobwebbed corner, then unfurl it like a dank snake onto dead leaves, tossed bottles, plastic bags. He will wash down the driveway as if it were a tub, car or no car nearby, and plod like a priest nudging the house to breathe. He looks, in this late season, like my newcomer father aga in, soothed by the sanctity of water. 

2. Salon Chair 

This will be a version of chairs in mostly Dominican salons. Can you imagine getting your hair highlighted here, shampooed and trimmed, entirely lopped off, hennaed and straightened, regularly groomed because you finally have the means? 

My first “salon” was in our Bronxwood Avenue kitchen, when my mother and aunt lined their five daughters up. In their cultures of hairdom—Indian and Antiguan—a woman’s crowning glory is her hair, my aunt said again and again. I hadn’t understood the politics of this as I sat, my hair washed with some egg-based concoction and baked under a heating helmet. It would not save my hair from molting, post 9/11, when I’d be misread if not outright called terrorist fag(iii). Back then, we sported lush braids that snaked down our bodies like extra defense. 

I pixie-cut this hair as a teen—Winona Ryder grunge in style— and again after my fellowship year, as if I intuited the depression that lay ahead, that crouched again after 2008, and again after Trump. I’d cut it into a bob in grad school and newly minted professor years—when I did not know how to heal the chronic pain in my lower back, my left leg, my weathervane gut—though my hair cryptically wrote a message as it calligraphed down the drain.

3. Glass Bowl 

Feel the serrated thickness of mid-20th c. Italian glass, bought for a dollar at the thrift store. Can you find one coin for each foyer of my family’s consecutive moves: 1981, 1986, 1987, and 1992? 

My mother picked pennies off the street, one of her many expressions for who I understood we were: penny-pickers in a house. This change was never enough, at some transactional pause across a counter, so that this is a glass bowl of never enough that, if its contents cascaded together, might equal enough to get by.

Can you find passes for the subway and the bus, $1.50 at the cusp of college and the new millennium? These were my first experiences of the phrase ticket out, lifelines to teeming crowds of strangers and momentary acquaintances. The passes will be thin and unexpired, so visitors can experience the foyer as a thruway, where you can sit and rest before you’re sent off with a ticket to something.

Pluck a candy from the change—Werther’s or peppermints. Because I was always cold with colds as a child—Reynaud’s my pediatrician said—I’d slip a lozenge into my coat pocket or loll it about in my mouth. Belatedly, I credit my folks: this was to leave a sweet taste in the traveler’s mouth. 

4. Bookshelf

Can you locate the following objects atop this mint green shelf: vials of shells, candles scented like sea grass, a tarot deck themed with starfish and mermaids and coral reef? Can you find, among the skyline of books, Buddhism for Tough Times or Jane Austen paperbacks or David Harvey’s translations of capital?

My mother lugged that shelf in from the street, as she did discarded furniture, sometimes recruiting my help, mostly not despite her five-foot frame. She dumped books she hated that I loved (though she had double majored in Assamese Literature and Language, though she had taught me to read and write before kindergarten) on these shelves. She stabilized the top with a vase of plastic flowers and with tchotchkes guests had gifted. Can you spot the Taj Mahal, the European porcelain?

This is how I learn we are haunted by the past, through facsimiles, how I learn to never travel without an edifying book in my bag.

When I began to dart off as a teen, libraries were lone oases of fellow readers. When the Bronx finally got a bookstore, 1999-2016(iv), I drove there with my father or alone, escaping from the house with its expectations, the streets with their own narrow boxes. Books, I discovered, are moving company.

5. Boombox-on-Bike 

This boombox-on-bike is designed for petite riders, like the bike an ex once made. I could lift that ride, ocean blue with yellow wire vining from the handlebars to the gears, pedal past him, dismantle then rebuild it as I moved from California back to New York in 2010. 

Imagine on loop: middle-aged guy cruising this bike down a boardwalk, boombox wired elaborately to the front crossbar. Merengue or salsa—as the music often is on Orchard Beach—and the man both gives a fuck and gives no fucks. 

Giving a fuck: he bikes up and down that boardwalk, the horns and timber fast and delighted, so the air is full of the Caribbean. Flag and shades right, he pumps that music over the grey Atlantic, its peach sands. 

Giving no fucks: he bikes up and down that boardwalk, Spanish overpowering all other languages, our picnic and handball chatter. Decade by decade, my parents melt before his boombox into grey hair and sweet rituals. Survivors of the skin-and-accent police, they nod in recognition. 

This boombox-on-bike is a communal ride for travelers racing in and out the foyer. Leave neither the boombox nor bike outside, as I did with my custom bike in San Diego, where it gathered dust in 2012, then disappeared. 

6. Rolling Rack 

This rack holds hoodies, totes, and scarves, or the paraphernalia of young Bronx travelers. On the lower rail, you might place staples of Bronx feet (Timberlands and flip flops) or the staples of Bronx ears (boxes of hoops). 

I owned a rack in Connecticut, where I moved in 2021 on the hopes that a VAP job might extend or convert. The offer never came. The chair (a white man) and an ex-chair (a black woman) let me know they were friends with each other and not with me. It was another place where I discovered venom for who I was rather than what I did.

But I hung my coats on that rack anyway, accumulated from four years back East. How much more cover would I need through academic malaise and MAGA? I hung scarves that had been gifted: rainbow origami from California, faux-fur from New Jersey, cream cotton from Meghalaya. I hung totes, like marked skins from research sites, including Hawai’i where I flew for $14 mid-January. A young man startled me on my Honolulu departure as he checked in my rental car. Sis, he kept saying, an echo of how often I’d been mistaken for Kanaka Maoli. It was a word I’d lost on the mainland, where I wheeled my rack on.

Hang your coat here, visitor. Take a scarf and shoes when you go.  

CATALOGUE 3

Drawings and paintings.
Present-day 
Japan, India, Brazil, Mexico, and the United States.
19th c. – early 21st c. 

1. Rajbanshi

Black scratch art underlaid by myriad colors, created in art class in Co-op City. Women picnic before a river, before a mountain range, behind a front row of unexpected pigs and cows, a duck with unraveling ribbons. The teacher had paused at one of the tree branch drawings, leaves pointing in an unusual direction, and said, I guess that’s what they call artistic license. The women, who are dressed in 19th c. puffed sleeves (European), a dashiki (African), and a kimono (Asian), read like New York iconography of liberal diversity.

What astonishes me is my talent, nurtured by my junior high teachers, whether Black or Irish or Italian, and generously acknowledged by peers. My civil engineer father taught me to draw, lifting up white pages on which he’d sketched marvelous cities in elegant lines. I didn’t yet exhibit the shame of loving color as a person of color, the anxiety of how can I make a living from this, the bruises for my rainbow gifts. 

That image sits in my abundance altar and I feel the force of what it could and could not predict. Dreams of sisterhood and the jibes of jealous peers. Flush of life waiting under the darkness of race. Omens of adult currents that would take me places goth and bucolic. 

2. Das 

Two gold-embossed pieces gifted by my closest female cousin, at the end of my 2012 trip (see “The Courtyard or A Man Named Victorious”)(v). Runuma Ba and her husband had commissioned it as a thank you. The art was by their school friend, a local artist named Angshuman Das, who lived in a modest home typical of rural Assam. The forthright gestures with which he and his wife received us, insisting on tea and discussing the process of making those images, lingers like aftershock. 

Travel teaches you to see talent everywhere, beyond no recognition, no fair shots. 

Runuma Ba and my sister-in-laws preferred images of brides, but I asked for images of working women: one fishing with a traditional jakoi, another spinning thread to weave. Can you see the song lyrics beside each woman? We picked these together from classic Assamese songs. For the fisherwoman, my aunt selected our home’s daughter, our home’s light. For the woman weaver, my cousin chose go slowly friend, go carefully. 

I love those golden women, swishing with their lithe arms the staples of Assamese culture, and I cherish those words, like micro-love letters across oceans. It pains me that they are mementos of my cousin’s death, that I was gifted anything through his undeserved absence. 

3. Teka 

Rectangular folk art, purchased in the 2013 Pelourinho market from an Afro-Brazilian man. Iemanja bedazzles, Mother Orixa of the Sea, the bright blues and silver glitter of her gown complementing her cocoa skin. Greenish-gold rays undulate from her figure, ripples streaming the canvas. She stands unframed except by the artist’s signature, Teka, in the bottom corner.

I had gone to the market for Oxum, the Orixa of Sweet Waters, who wears yellow. But my friend then, a Ghanian-American graduate student, had wanted this painting I barely remember beyond Oxum’s canary dress. I should have persuaded her to buy a different portrait of Oxum or offered to accompany her to Pelourinho for haggling. But I caved from guilt—who was I to deny the orixa of sweetness and pleasure to my vain, charming friend—and asked that she acquire a painting of Iemanja in exchange.

Iemanja’s painting has usually hung in a living room corner and Black guests have gravitated near her slim column of protection. I wonder if Iemanja summoned herself here, the orixa to whom the enslaved surely prayed when crated at sea. I am freer than them, yet ask for her blessings too, city by city, an itinerant writer searching for home. 

4. Rivera

Small wall print of Rivera, a red-shirted man knee-bent under a bouquet larger than him. Though I don’t like Rivera beyond his socialist sympathies, the artist is undeniable: saturated colors that evoke Latin culture, thick lines that praise brown-toned peasants with indigenous faces and hands and feet.

I bought El Vendedora de Flores when I moved to Philly, for the Visiting Assistant Professor position I’d hold for three years, the longest before I secured a tenure-track job in Ohio. I had just left California, where a white Spaniard professor, I was told by an advisor, had railed against me—this is Mexico—and recruited another male professor to write a letter against my candidacy. The Spaniard identified as a working-class man, though not as a homeowner in Santa Barbara, where my estranged sister and more conservative peers live.

It mattered that the Marxist Chicana professor supported me. 

It mattered that my best friend from the program, and from a migrant family, hung out with me despite the judgment of other Chicano students. It mattered that an outside acquaintance, a Mexican woman who also had chronic pain, protested the gossip, saying Mexico has everybody! 

This is why, as an Assamese American, I can’t say Bangladeshis don’t belong. My foyer will harbor other vendedores de flores. 

5. O’Keefe 

The largest wall painting, Oriental Poppies, burns vermillion across a hundred years, flames bursting around velvet black holes. 

I bought the heavy print in the summer of 2019, when I was bedridden from my second surgery. I wanted something unabashedly sensuous in my bedroom, something that fired me up again—before the judgmental shrews, the enterprising rakes—a reminder of my inner irons. 

O’Keefe left New York after brutal treatment by Stieglitz, who’d cheated on her, another male ego shady from the start. She discovered the deserts of the U.S. Southwest and painted the burnished skies, the bones and thorns, the miracle of flowers in the arid West. I was myself in a two-year pause, after a melodramatic ending with a disturbed African American veteran. He had cheated on me with his ex-fiancée and, during one year, swung between bouts of love-bombing and verbal free-fighting. 

The red poppies are among all that seduced and shaped me in California. There I wrote most of the stories in Sugar, Smoke, Song(vi) and there I wrote a 400-page dissertation on caste. I grew into running barefoot on the beach, punching on the page, limping across ten years of moves. I learned what it meant to be a traveler by circumstance rather than choice.

6. Hiroshige 

Lesser known contemporary of Hokusai, Hiroshige also mastered the woodblock style. In Sumidagawa Suijin No Mori Massaki, you must look through the cherry tree, framing the right side, white-and-pink blossoms peering like curious children’s heads. Travelers plod along the road to the Sumida river underlining the mountain Tsukuba, centering the painting. The road lightning bolts across the park, where travelers pray to the river god at a tiny Suijin shrine in the lower right.

I stumbled upon this painting when my Korean partner visited Connecticut from New York in 2021. I had insisted on driving us to H-Mart, that pan-Asian grocery mecca, where he’d never been. Forty minutes to a mislabeled gas station on my GPS and, when he groaned and laughed, I insisted we were meant to be here and looked up antiques stores instead.

The Hiroshige sat in a back corner room, behind large furniture and with a circle sticker $115. It reminded me of what my partner had said on our second date as we walked into our first antique shop together: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” It reminded me of my summer pilgrimage to Sedona, visiting shrines, praying for healing, for real love. It reminded me—Hiroshige’s travelers catching the Hashida ferry—of miraculous destinations.

Footnotes

i Working chapter in travel memoir manuscript, A Woman Named Lightning, A Man Named Victorious

ii Acronyms for Armed Forces Special Powers Act, United Liberation Front of Assam, and Surrendered United Liberation Front of Assam, respectively

iii Reference to term from Jasbir Puar’s scholarship on The War on Terror

iv Barnes & Noble

v Published chapter essay from travel memoir manuscript (Sunspot Literary Journal, Vol. 5 Issue 1)

vi Debut fiction book (Red Hen Press, 2020)