“But that would ruin its beauty—and its value,” protests Aunt.
“What’s your solution then?” Mother sounds irritable. They’ve reached this impasse before, I can tell.
To my surprise Aunt lowers her eyes. Her cheeks redden like a bashful girl’s. For a moment I can see how beautiful she must have been before the shock of her husband’s death turned her into a grasping, scolding, fearful woman. She takes a deep breath and lets her words tumble out. “I think Sudha should have the ruby, seeing how Anju has so much more. Besides, it was her father who brought it to us in the first place—”
“That’s not fair, Nalini,” Pishi says sharply, “and you know it. Why, if any one of the girls is to have it, it should be Anju. Because if your husband hadn’t put all those wayward ideas into Bijoy’s head, he would still be here today.”
I’m taken aback by the naked animosity in Pishi’s voice. It’s true that throughout our childhood the mothers disagreed on how things should be done, and sometimes even argued hotly. But the next day they’d be the best of allies—if not friends, united against us. Sudha and I used to joke about how they were like the holy trinity, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, keeping our little domestic world on track. Had it been a facade all this time, carefully constructed to keep us from guessing how fragile the foundation of our household really was? Now that we were almost married and no longer needed to be sheltered, cracks were widening underfoot, the ground beginning to shift.
Sudha’s been staring at the stone as if there are invisible letters on its fiery surface that only she can read. Now she says, decisively, “Pishi’s right. I want Anju to have the ruby.”
“You brainless girl,” cries Aunt N. “You don’t know what you’re saying!” She turns to my mother in agitation. “Don’t listen to her, Gouri Di.”
Mother starts to say something, but I interrupt. From somewhere a thought has come to me, so lightning-sharp, so clearly not mine, that I know it’s the correct answer.
“The ruby must be put back in the vault.” I even sound different, my voice full as a temple gong. “It’s not really ours. None of us has a right to it. Not until—”
“Not until what?” asks Pishi. But I shake my head.
“She’s right,” says Mother, sounding startled. The other mothers nod as well. They all look relieved. Mother hands me the box and asks me to take it back to the bank tomorrow.
I feel very grown-up as I walk down the corridor alone. It’s a little scary. In my hands the box is lighter than I thought it would be. Sudha’s gone off to her room, saying she needs a nap. I’ll have to wait to tell her the part I held back from the words that had been sent—there’s no other way to say it—to me. Not until we’ve suffered even further, not until the house of the Chatterjees is reduced to a heap of dusty rubble.
As though it were only a matter of time.
IT IS THE day before our weddings, and the house is filled with frenzied activity. Hordes of men are at work stringing up lights and setting up an enormous tent on the lawn. In the courtyard behind the kitchen, hired cooks bustle around huge clay ununs, constructed for the occasion, where curries and dals are bubbling. The air is pungent with the aroma of mustard fish and tomato chutney, for many of our out-of-town relatives have arrived already and must be fed. This morning Pishi gave us, with much pride, two lawn handkerchiefs on which she’d embroidered good-luck lotuses twined into our initials with red silk thread. Now she has disappeared into her room to make our wedding garlands. The other mothers are equally busy with last-minute details.
Only we, the brides, have nothing to do. We asked Pishi if we could help, but she shooed us from her room—it is bad luck, apparently, for brides to touch their garlands before the proper moment. We wandered through the chaos downstairs for a while, but it was disorienting, the way people—even the servants we had known all our lives—watched us with awe and a certain respectful formality, as though we’d been transformed by our bridal status into anointed beings.
So we are back in our rooms now, where we are to rest ourselves—as though that were possible in the midst of all this hallah. Anju lies on my bed, reading a book. Trying to read, I should say, for in the last half-hour she has not turned a single page. I sit by her, twisting the tendrils of her hair around my finger, as I have loved to do since I was little. So many sadnesses are swirling through my mind. Images of the life I have known all these years, the sense that I am leaving it irrevocably behind. When I return next it will be not as a daughter of the Chatterjees but a daughter-in-law who belongs to her new family.
My traitor memory brings me another image: a young man waiting in blazing heat by the roadside, his lips on mine in the dim alcove of a temple smelling of incense and foolish hope, that brief dazzling time when I believed that I was to be his. Unbearable now, so I turn to my cousin and say, “Remember when we were little, the time we played hide and seek, how you locked yourself into the almirah where Pishi keeps her clothes?”
“Yes,” laughs Anju. “And how terrified I was that I’d suffocate to death in there—but of course you came and rescued me!”
“And remember the time when we ate panipuris from a street vendor outside our school and got sick?”
“Indeed I do! And that delicious jeera water the man gave us afterward to drink. It was well worth our upset stomachs!” Anju sits up, animated. “Remember those make-believe games we used to play? How you always insisted on being the princess!”
“Only because you liked being prince better!” I retort.
“And remember that old house near the Ganges where that man—I think he was some kind of great-uncle—lived? We went there once, for a wedding.”
I close my eyes and see the building, yellow plaster fallen away in chunks, a roof crusted with mossy growths. “We climbed up to the terrace on one of those old spiral staircases attached to the outside of the house—I was sure I’d fall down, but you wouldn’t allow me to stop.”
“Silly!” says Anju, laughing. “You know I’d never have let you fall!” Then her eyes take on a faraway look. “Wasn’t there a room on the terrace, a locked room? Wasn’t there a boy?”
At first I can’t remember, but then I see him, a boy not much older than us, beckoning from behind a barred window, his eyes strangely slanted, his fingers fat and pale as earthworms. He’d made grunting noises we couldn’t understand, and when we ran away, frightened, he’d beaten on the bars and wept.
“Remember how all the women scolded us when we came down and told them what we found? How later Pishi explained to us that the poor boy had been born with some kind of brain defect?”
I nod. The memory makes me shiver. What would Anju’s father-in-law say if he knew of the hidden boy? Would it qualify in his books as a scandal?
“You know, Sudha,” says Anju, playing with the glass wedding bangles on my arm. “There’ll be no one to whom I can ever talk this way again, who’ll know what I mean without explanation.” Her eyes are full of tears. And suddenly the fact that we are leaving each other cuts into me like a whiplash—the way truths do, sooner or later, when you have kept your gaze turned deliberately away from them. But I must not cry. Once I begin I will not be able to stop, I have so much to weep for. So I say, with false gaiety, “You’ll have Sunil! He’ll soon mean more to you than any cousin!”
“Don’t joke,” says Anju, and from her stiff voice I can tell she’s deeply offended. “My love for you is totally different.” She drops my hand. “I’m going to see if Mother is back. I want to make sure she doesn’t tire herself out.”
I should go after Anju and soothe her, and say I didn’t mean it, but I am filled with a heaviness that keeps me from moving. Can it be true that nothing can take the place of a true love, not even another love? One part of me longs to believe it. But if it were—how then would I live the rest of my life with this torn-out hole in my chest? And yet I would not want to change what I’ve chosen. Oh, if only the weddings were over, and all choices behind me forever.
/> There’s a knocking on my door. It is Singhji with a pile of letters and packets. I’m a little taken aback. Except for the night of Gouri Ma’s heart attack, he has never come into the house. Besides, it is Ramur Ma’s job to bring up the mail. But perhaps on this topsy-turvy day she cannot be found. When I ask him in, he shakes his head but looks around with a shy curiosity. I wonder what he makes of the heavy furniture and the dark-hued oil paintings which go back to before I was born. When I was younger, how I had hated them. But Mother said it was disrespectful to the spirit of our Chatterjee ancestors to change anything. Perhaps she had been embarrassed to admit she didn’t have the money. I’d consoled myself with the thought that when I got married I would have the room I wanted, light and airy, with an oleander-pink bedcover and flowers in a slender silver vase, but now that it is about to finally happen, the prospect is joyless.
I shuffle through the pile of letters without enthusiasm. For weeks now people who cannot come to the wedding have been mailing us little blessing-gifts. I am about to tell Singhji to take the whole lot down to Gouri Ma when I notice a small, fat packet without a sender’s name.
Later Pishi and I will examine the envelope—a common, brown-paper one bearing a central Calcutta postmark and my name printed in blocky letters—over and over, but at this moment I pay it little attention as I tear it open. And all of a sudden my lap is full of money, hundred-rupee notes—scores and scores of them, it seems, spilled from the packet. I gasp in shock. Even Singhji, who is always so calm, has clapped a hand over his mouth. Who? I feel in the envelope for a letter, but there’s nothing. And then as I sift through the notes I see it, a small slip of paper on which is written, in flowing Bengali characters, To Sudha: May your life be as full of joy as mine has been of sorrow. Your Father.
My brain feels short-circuited, my heart twists as though the last drop of blood is being wrung from it. If it weren’t for the money, I would have thought it a cruel joke, but here it is, a lapful, more money than I had ever imagined.
My father, alive?
“Why, beti,” whispers Singhji in awe, “there’s enough here for Ashok Babu and you to live on for years.”
Temptation runs through me like an electric shock. But finally I shake my head. All the money in the world will not help me if Anju’s marriage is broken off.
I hand the other packages to Singhji and motion him to leave. I know he sees my fingers trembling. I know I can trust him not to speak of what he’s seen in this room. For that I feel a brief thankfulness—then the jagged rock that is my heart lacerates me. Alive, all this time, and never came to us. Never came to help us when we needed it so much, never came to see me, his daughter, to hold me in his arms—
Singhji’s eyes are full of a wondering sadness as he takes the packages from my hands. Even after he leaves I feel his emotions swirling around me, compassionate as a rain-bearing wind. He would like to do something to help me. But he cannot. Nor can my father. It is too late now. Eighteen years too late.
In Pishi’s room I close the door and brace myself against it. The smell of the flowers, damp, cool, temple-like, assails me. Rajani gandha, bel, jui. White as grinning teeth. White as lightning in night storms. White as the widow’s dress my mother has been wearing in bitterness for so many needless years. The door is shivery-cold against my back. I shut my eyes tight and wish, as I did when I was a child, that time would double back on itself and give me back my life as it was half an hour ago. The serenity of ignorance. The innocence. But the weight in the bundled-up anchal of my sari will allow me no escape.
“What’s the matter?” Pishi rises in concern, holding a gorgeous creation of jasmines and white roses with silver thread woven into it. It is my wedding garland—she’d drawn out the design weeks ago. “Are you ill?”
I can well imagine how I appear, my face bloodless against the dark mahogany of the door, my chest heaving.
“Shall I call the doctor?” asks Pishi. She puts out her hand to feel my forehead. I want to crumple against her as in childhood, to let her lead me to bed, to sleep away what has just occurred as though it were a fever dream. But I am a woman now. So I hand her the letter in silence.
When Pishi looks up from the letter, the paleness in her face matches mine. She does not say what I desperately want her to: that it must be from some heartless prankster. And when I let go of my sari-end so the banknotes I had gathered into it fall in a rush to the floor, she draws in her breath—but it’s not so much the sound of shock as of a fear fulfilled. We stare at the pile of money, suddenly bright in a ray of sunshine that has struggled in from between the shutters she closed to keep the flowers fresh. It strikes me that my father—but he’s dead—must be rich. The thought fills me with fury as I remember our years of scrimping and scraping, my mother’s endless complaints, Gouri Ma silently pushing herself until the worry spread its tentacles through her arteries.
The forgotten garland crushed in her hand, Pishi bends down to touch the bills. They make a dry shuffling sound, like someone walking on dead leaves. When she straightens, it is slowly, painfully, as though in a matter of minutes she has grown immensely old. In her fist the garland is a rope of bruised blooms, white and red.
Red?
I pry open her fingers and see the needle embedded in her palm. “Pishi!” I cry. She looks down, but it is as though she doesn’t see it, doesn’t feel the pain. I take a deep breath and pull it out, pressing down on the wound to stop the blood. The garland that was to have been mine lies crumpled on the floor, blood-defiled. I wonder if this means bad luck, then want to laugh. How much worse can my luck get?
I am trying to remember where Pishi keeps the iodine with which she used to clean our skinned knees. I rummage in her chest of drawers, and after a while I find the bottle. There’s no cotton wool, so I dip the edge of my sari in the brown liquid and hold it to her palm.
“We never did go to identify the bodies.” Pishi speaks indistinctly, as though she were immured in glass. “Your mothers were in no state to travel, and I had to take care of them—and Anju and you as well. Besides, the police said there was no point. The bodies had been in the water for a while, and the fish had got to the faces. The police had the moneybags that were in one of the men’s pocket—they said that was identification enough. So they sent the bodies back in sealed caskets and we cremated them. But now I’m thinking—someone could easily have—”
“What are you saying?” I whisper. The iodine has stained my sari a burnt-paper brown, a color that will never come clean. I taste the nauseous yellow of bile in my mouth. So many times in my life I thought I was afraid. Now I realize that until this moment I did not know what fear was.
Pishi looks away. “There were three men, remember? One of them could have slipped his moneybag into another man’s pocket after he’d—”
I put my hands over my ears, but the phrase already pounds its rhythm inside my skull.
Killed him. Killed him. Killed him.
“My father!”—the word sticks in my throat, the most distasteful word in the world. “No!”
But the pictures have already started flashing through the thunder roaring in my brain, through the mingled odors of iodine and wedding flowers and blood.
I am seeing a boat rocking in a river that winds along the swamps of Sundarban. Monkeys yammer hideously in the vine-choked trees overhead, and in the distance one can hear the howling of hyenas. Mosquitoes buzz and buzz, and tempers are short. It is too hot, there’s not enough wind to guide the sail, and the three men are tired of rowing and of cooking their own meals, now that they have sent the bearers away for safety’s sake. The elation they felt on finding the cave—for indeed they have found it, and gathered their rubies, and tied them securely into their waistbands—has been replaced by a strange depression. Because they have adventured and won—and are no different from when they left their easy Calcutta existences. And it is in this frame of mind that my uncle Bijoy picks a quarrel with my father one evening when their partner i
s at the other end of the boat, cooking the night meal. He tells my father what he knows, and accuses him of being an impostor, a liar, a cheat who took advantage of the goodness of the Chatterjees.
And my father? Does he deny it? Does he plead for forgiveness? I do not think so. A black rage breaks over his face that Bijoy should have spoiled things just when luck had at last smiled on him. Rage mixed with shame, which is the worse kind. Before he realizes what he is doing, he has picked up an oar and hit my uncle over the head. The thwack of wood hitting flesh ricochets through the forest. The body slumps, sacklike, into a corner of the boat. And when the partner comes running, crying What was that? there’s nothing to do but swing the oar again.
Does my father weep, then, kneeling beside the man who had loved him like the brother he never was? No. I will not give him tears. Dry-eyed, teeth clenched, he lifts first one body, then the other—how like sleeping children they are, slack-limbed and trusting in his arms—to drop them over the side. But first he raises their shirts to untie the pouches. Is it hard for him to touch their still-warm skin? To slide his moneybag into the pouch where he knew Bijoy kept his, feeling, under his fingers, a still-beating heart? Does he shudder when he hears the first splash, and then, like an echo, the second? Does he jump, startled, when, from the shore, he hears a pack of jackals yelping their displeasure?
And that night, when the white moon rises in the ink sky and a pair of night birds circle the mast, crying like the souls of the dead, is he frightened then, my father? Does he wish the act undone, the act that has cut him off from his wife and coming baby, forever? The act that will force him to change his name and, with only the baleful red glow of the rubies for company, move to some faraway city. But no, the postmark on the envelope said Calcutta. A shudder goes through me as I realize he has been inhabiting the outskirts of our lives for years, watching us. Maybe he sat in a taxi across the street when school was done and Anju and I came strolling out. Maybe he brushed against me when we went shopping in the crowded corridors of New Market. Maybe he stopped outside our gates late at night and watched the lights go out one by one, and imagined my mother and me in our beds. What thoughts might go through the head of a man like that? Through and through and through, until one day, eighteen years later, he sold a gemstone and stacked the banknotes in a pile and picked up a pen and wrote, To Sudha.