And thus for a few hours I am spared the news that what Gouri Ma suffered last night was a mild heart attack. When the doctor warned her that the next one might be far more severe, she decided she must get Anju married as soon as possible.
THE BRIDAL preparations are in full swing, and since my mother is too ill, she’s turned things over to Aunt N.
Aunt’s created an entire regimen for us. Each morning we start by eating almonds which have been soaked overnight in milk. (This, Aunt has declared, will cool our systems, calm our minds, and improve both our dispositions and our complexions.) Then we have to do a half-hour of yoga and calisthenics (to give us endurance, which we’re sure to need as wives, and prevent the sagging of various body parts, which might be offensive to our future husbands). Then we must apply turmeric paste to our faces (more complexion improvement) and keep the pungent, itchy mask on for half an hour while Ramur Ma rubs warm coconut oil into our hair. (Long, well-oiled, obedient hair symbolizes virtue in women.)
At bathtime we scrub ourselves all over with pumice stones. (“Nothing enhances a husband’s affections like silk-soft skin,” says Aunt. She’s taken to startling us with these nuggets of Kama Sutra–like wisdom. Earlier Sudha and I would have shared a good laugh over them. But nowadays I’m too heartsore.) After lunch we lie in bed with eau de cologne–soaked cloths over our eyes. Sometimes I can’t believe this is happening to me. Surely it’s a dream, this slight damp pressure on my lids, this sweetish smell that settles in my clothes. This stunned lassitude that keeps me from rebelling.
Soon it’s time to get up for our afternoon lessons. A kerosene stove’s been set up on the upstairs balcony and a middle-aged Brahmin woman whom Aunt has hired demonstrates elaborate desserts such as gopal-bhog and pati-shapta, which I know I’ll never be able to duplicate. We help with the preparations but stay away from the stove: One of Aunt’s friends has told her a story about a bride who got burned a week before her wedding, which was, of course, immediately canceled. The Brahmin lady also gives us lessons in the intricate laws of orthodox Hindu cuisine: milk and meat products mustn’t be mixed. Nonvegetarian items must be cooked in separate vessels. The left hand must never be used when serving food. Once I asked her what the point of all these rules was, but she looked at me uncomprehendingly.
Finally, when the seamstress comes to teach Sudha sewing, I get an hour off. I’d like to get away to the terrace, but Aunt has declared that on no account are we to expose ourselves to sun. Nor are we to cry—baggy red-rimmed eyes would undo an entire month of her efforts. So I try to focus on a book and not think of my mother.
The doctor says my mother needs to undergo bypass surgery, but she refuses. She says she knows too many people who died from the infection afterward. She can’t take such a risk, not until Sudha and I are married. She’s doing everything else the doctor wants her to—going for short, careful walks, working fewer hours, cutting out fats. But all it’s done is make her lose a lot of weight, so that her cheekbones press up sharp as mountain ridges through her skin.
Mother’s often angry nowadays, mostly because her tiredness forces her to stay in bed when there’s so much to be done. She’s moved downstairs into an annex off the main hall because climbing stairs has become too difficult. I wonder if she wakes up sometimes in the middle of the night, disoriented to find herself, after thirty years, in a new bed. Does her hand reach for the familiar bedpost carved with grape leaves and find itself closing on dark air?
She’s also decided to sell the bookstore. We just don’t have enough money otherwise, she’s explained to me, for two weddings. Two dowries. Dowries are a slippery issue, I’ve come to learn. A good family never demands a particular amount of money, or a certain list of items. That would be too gauche. And so the bride’s party has to anticipate their wishes and go beyond them, because if they don’t, it might affect their daughter’s future.
I can’t imagine the bookstore not belonging to us. Maybe Mother can’t either. Maybe that’s another reason why she’s so angry. She’s nursed that store fiercely all these years, spent more time with it than with me. It must be awfully hard for her to think of some stranger sitting at her little desk in the back, ordering trashy romances and potboilers to fill its shelves.
At first I tried to get her to reconsider. “I can help you run it while I go to college,” I pleaded. “I’ll take care of all the details—I know a lot of them already, and Manager-babu can teach me the rest.”
Mother shook her head with finality, as though the papers had been signed already. When my face fell, she took my hands in hers and said, “I’m sorry, Anju, I’ve let you down, haven’t I? All your plans for college—and now the bookstore. I was going to leave it to you—in your name, not your husband’s—to run as you wished. I guess there’s a lot we hope for that never happens.” She paused for breath, then said, “But I’ll promise you this much, Anju Ma. I’ll arrange your marriage with a man who lets you go to college—and lets you work too, if you want it.”
“But why must I get married in such a hurry?” I cried angrily. “Why can’t you just get the surgery done instead? Why are you so scared? The doctor said it isn’t that dangerous anymore—”
I could tell by the way Mother pressed her lips together until they turned white that I’d made her angry. But all she said was, “I can’t take such a big chance. What if I die? Who else is there to take care of you and Sudha? To make sure you get a good match?” Then she lay back, eyes closed, and Pishi, who’d come in with a glass of lime sharbat, motioned worriedly for me to leave.
In the evenings when the terrible June heat ebbs a little, we gather around my mother, making a special effort to be cheerful. Pishi turns on the radio so Mother can listen to the songs of Tagore, which she loves. Ramur Ma brings in the tea tray, and Aunt Nalini pours. We use our good cups on these evenings. At first Mother protested. But when Pishi said, “What are we saving them for? What can be a better occasion than this, while the family’s still together, before the girls go off to their husbands’ homes?” she didn’t argue. Perhaps she was thinking that pretty soon she might be gone too.
The cups are quite beautiful, painted on the inside with dragons, so that each sip you take uncovers a little more of their green, glittery scales.
“A traveling Chinese prince gave them to your grandfather,” says Pishi. “He said the dragons had special powers. If you could please them, they would grant you a wish.”
“How would you please them?” Sudha asks. All these years, and she’s still the girl who believed in falling stars and demons.
“He wouldn’t tell us that. He said we each had to discover it for ourselves. Otherwise the wish wouldn’t work.”
“Nice trick!” I mutter. But when my cup’s empty, I stare at the dragon inside. That’s how foolish I’ve grown in my desperation. The dragon’s wings seem to flutter, just a little. Its ruby eye gleams. Perhaps it’s a cousin of the magic serpents of Sudha’s tale? Make my mother well, I command it. But my tone isn’t right. Offended, the dragon flicks its tail at me and turns back into porcelain.
Toward the end of the evening, the mothers discuss prospective bridegrooms. We aren’t allowed to be present at these discussions. The mothers don’t want to fill our heads with romantic ideas which might come to nothing. Once the men have been screened and initial talks conducted, we’ll be given details of the lucky ones.
So when the song hour ends, Aunt N says in a falsely jovial voice, “Now run along, children.” Pishi unlocks the Godrej safe that stands in the corner and takes out several thick yellow envelopes addressed in the matchmaker’s spindly writing, and the mothers draw close to examine the offers one more time.
“I think we should see them too,” I said once. “Maybe the ones you choose aren’t the ones we’d like.”
Pishi looked undecided, but Aunt said, “Precisely. You’d like all the unsuitable ones, and then we’d have weeks of arguments.”
“Trust us, Anju,” said Mother. “We want yo
ur happiness even more than you do.”
What could I say after that?
From what I’ve overheard Aunt N say to the teatime aunties, so far the offers have been disappointing. Maybe the mothers have set their standards too high. Or maybe nowadays smart men don’t want marriages arranged by some old fogey of a matchmaker. Personally, I don’t care if the process takes years. Perhaps I could cajole the mothers into letting me attend college meanwhile? But then I hear Mother coughing anxiously, a thin, tearing sound. I see the strain lines around her mouth, like cracks in porcelain, and I’m ashamed of my selfishness.
Sudha’s anxious too. She won’t talk about it, but I know she’s wondering if Ashok’s proposal is sitting in the almirah in one of those yellow envelopes. Surely the mothers wouldn’t discard it without telling us? Or did his parents decide not to make an offer at all?
As the months pass and I watch her eyes grow haunted and sooty, my sympathy for Ashok begins to fade. I wonder angrily whether Ashok even told his parents about Sudha. Maybe he was only in love with the idea of being in love. It was enough for him to play-act the wan hero who waits by the roadside for his beloved’s chariot to pass by. Perhaps marriage was never a part of it.
Tonight Sudha sits on my windowsill and stares out at the September night where white clouds glide like carefree swans. We’ve started a few halfhearted conversations, then broken them off distractedly.
Soon it’ll be the month of Durga Puja, which is considered unsuitable for weddings, and all talks will stop for a while. So far Mother has shown us only two offer letters. One was an old zamidar family like ours; the other had received a title fifty years back from the British. Both families were quite aware of their importance and their sons’ impeccable marital credentials. Pompous asses, in fact. Mother must have felt that too, for when we begged her to say no she didn’t disagree. Even Aunt N went along with the decision, though in her typical way she reminded us that Calcutta was filled with spinsters who wept every night into their pillows, regretting their earlier finickiness.
When I see how thin Mother has grown, how she stoops over the cane she’s recently started using, I feel a balled-up rage swelling in my throat until I think I’ll choke on it. She tried hard to keep her illness a secret, but that’s impossible in this city of a million watching eyes. Maybe that’s why we aren’t getting offers for the bookstore. They’re waiting like vultures for us to grow desperate. And why we aren’t getting good marriage offers either. Wives must be good breeding stock, and people don’t want to have anything to do with hereditary diseases.
I’m jerked back to the present by the sound of Sudha weeping softly. I go to her and rub her back, wishing I could make her feel better. Helpless fury drives me to clichés. That blithering idiot, I think. That lily-livered coward. What on earth is he doing? It makes me even angrier when I remember I was the reason they met in the first place.
“Listen,” I tell Sudha. “I’ll go to Mother and tell her about you and Ashok, how much you care about him, how you wouldn’t be happy marrying anyone else. If she’s concerned about him being from a different caste, I’ll remind her of Priya Aunty’s son who went to Oxford and brought back a British wife, and now look how everyone adores her.”
Sudha stops crying. Her eyes widen. She’s listening very carefully.
“I’ll ask if Ashok’s family made an offer, and if they haven’t, I’ll ask Mother to approach them. And if they aren’t interested in our proposal, then we can put the whole thing behind us and go on with our lives, knowing we did our—”
“No!” Sudha says with startling energy. “I don’t want you saying anything to Gouri Ma.”
“But why? You love him, right? All this waiting’s making you crazy, right? Why shouldn’t I ask her then? Why should we women always wait for things to happen to us?”
“No, Anju. If Ashok really loves me, if he really wants to marry me, he’s got to make the first move.”
Really, Sudha can be so stubborn. “This isn’t the time for false pride,” I tell her. “Besides, how do you know he hasn’t?”
“Well, if they’ve turned down his offer, he’s got to come up with another plan. And he will. If he really loves me, he will.”
I stare at Sudha’s face, the spots of feverish color high on her cheeks, the faraway, unfocused look in her eyes. What does it remind me of?
And then I know. During those fairy tales we acted out as children, when Sudha was always the captured princess I had to rescue, she’d have the same tranced look on her face. In the course of rescuing her I’d run into trouble—that was part of the game—my royal horse tripping as I climbed hills formed out of human skulls, or a sea serpent grabbing me in its coils—but she never attempted to help me. Instead she’d sit on the bed with clasped hands and a concerned expression on her face while I writhed around on the floor, grappling with the monsters she’d imagined. Once, exasperated because it wasn’t much fun playing this way, I asked her why.
She looked at me in surprise. “But it’s your job to overcome obstacles and prove yourself,” she said. “That’s what princes are supposed to do. If I helped you it wouldn’t be the same.”
I’m not sure when Sudha started getting caught in the enchanted web of the stories she loved so much and told so well. When, in some place deep inside her impervious to logic, she turned Ashok into the prince who has to save her from the clutches of the wicked king. Once he managed to place her on his milk-white steed, she’d follow him faithfully to the ends of the earth. But until then the rules of the story didn’t permit her—and, by extension, me—to help him.
“Please, Sudha,” I try one more time. “This is your life, not some stupid fairy tale in a book. Things never happen the way those stories say they do. And even if they did, I’m sure the princesses didn’t just sit and—”
“Promise me you won’t interfere, that you won’t say anything about Ashok to Gouri Ma,” Sudha says. Did she hear even a word of what I just said? In the milky moonlight her face has taken on a phosphorescent, fanatical glow. “Promise!” Her eyes bore into me until I mutter a grudging okay.
“Thank you, Anju!” she cries, throwing exuberant arms around me. “I knew you’d understand. Now we’d better get to bed. If Mother sees dark circles under our eyes tomorrow, we won’t hear the end of it for weeks.”
But I remain standing at the window long after Sudha’s gone. The night air, foggy now, wraps itself around me like a damp, mildewed shroud. I can’t see. I can’t breathe. I’m afraid Sudha’s making a terrible mistake, and I, whose job it is to stop her, don’t know how.
I AM DESPERATE.
A proposal has come in for me, one which all the mothers agree is a wonderful one. It is from a family in Bardhaman, a town which is not too small and not too far away. The Sanyal family—that’s their name—is distinguished and wealthy, but not too much so. The groom, Ramesh, is also fatherless. At Mr. Sanyal’s death, greedy relatives had tried to swindle Ramesh’s mother out of the family business. “But she was too smart for them,” Pishi says. “She foiled their wicked plans and ran it most successfully—just like your Aunt Gouri—and made sure her three sons lacked for nothing.”
She was charming too, on the phone. And frank. “I’ll tell you right away, in spite of his name, my son’s no god of beauty,” she had said to Gouri Ma with a laugh. “That’s why I’m looking for a beautiful bride. My motives are quite selfish, I’ll admit: I want good-looking grandsons!”
The son who is no god of beauty has a high-ranking job with Indian Railways that requires a great deal of traveling on his part. I am not to worry, says my prospective mother-in-law. I will not have to go to all those godforsaken places where new rail lines are being laid down. I am to stay home with her and be the daughter she never had. She is looking forward to turning the household over to my care and spending her time with her prayer beads. And oh yes, dowry is of no concern—what with the son’s salary, and the profits from the recent sale of the business, they have more th
an enough.
“Imagine that, no dowry demands!” says my mother, impressed. “Of course we’ll still give Sudha a magnificent trousseau. We don’t want people to say later that the Chatterjees were tight-fisted at their daughter’s wedding.”
Pishi examines the photo of the bridegroom, the long lean body, the dark skin, the plain face, the slightly receding chin. “He’s not too ugly for our Sudha, is he?” she asks.
“Nonsense,” says my mother. “I’ve seen far worse.”
“His eyes are kind and intelligent,” Gouri Ma says. “He’ll know how to appreciate Sudha. That’s the most important thing. Why, they’ll all love her sweetness and sense of duty.”
If only she knew how bitter I feel, how undutiful. My chest is on fire, as though I have swallowed a nestful of red ants. I think I am going mad.
Ashok, where are you? Have you forgotten me?
Because I don’t know what else to do, I go looking for Singhji. He helped me once. Perhaps he would do it again.
After lunch when the household sleeps, I throw aside the eau de cologne–soaked cloths and rise from my bed. I tiptoe past the soft snoring sounds, and the drone of ceiling fans. In the downstairs hallway, I freeze for an instant when I hear a cough. Then I am outside, running along the gravel driveway to the small gatehouse, where our gatekeeper—when we had one—used to stay. On the afternoons when Singhji is not needed, more and more nowadays since Gouri Ma rarely goes to the bookstore, he rests there. Gouri Ma had offered to let him have the room permanently, but Singhji declined in his polite, taciturn way. Perhaps he liked the distance, the ability to shrug us and our troubles from his mind when he went home at night.