When I got married, Aunt Tarini gave me a silk sari just like the one my mother-in-law had bought me to wear during the Bardhaman ceremonies, but with more gold embroidery on it. In retaliation, my mother-in-law presented Aunt Tarini’s daughter-in-law with a monstrously heavy seven-strand gold necklace at her wedding last year. Ramesh had protested, in his quiet way. We can’t really afford it, he said, and besides, what’s the point? But she brushed his words aside like flies, as she always did when he disagreed with her. And he gave in, as he always did at such times. This morning, when Aunt Tarini arrived, she brought six suitcases filled to the brim with gifts for our family, including the servants and the neighbors. I shudder to think what my mother-in-law will do when, later in the year, it is time for our annual visit to Bahrampur.
I am sitting on the kitchen floor, instructing the maid about which spices to grind—we are preparing a daunting feast, enough to give Aunt Tarini a week-long heartburn—when my mother-in-law hurries in. At first I think she has come to check on the lobsters that our fish seller delivered this morning, the hugest I’ve ever seen, clanging their claws angrily at the bottom of a steel pail. Bahrampur has no seafood worth speaking of, and my mother-in-law has gleefully confided in me that she can’t wait to catch the look on Aunt’s face when the lobster curry is served.
But when I look more closely I can see that she is furious. Her lips are clamped shut and there are thunderbolts in her eyes. It unnerves me to see her like this, for I’ve always thought of her as a large, rooted banyan, spreading her comforting shade over the family.
“What’s the matter?” I ask, wishing that Aunt Tarini had never left Bahrampur. “What has she done now?”
My mother-in-law glares at the maid, who scurries out. “It’s Deepa,” she says, her voice volcanic.
Deepa is Aunt Tarini’s daughter-in-law, a plump, sweet-faced girl with hardly a word to say for herself. At her wedding my mother-in-law had seemed to take a liking to her. Isn’t she pretty, she’d said to various relatives. Why, she’s almost as pretty as Sudha. And, It’s good she has a placid nature—she’ll need it with that Tarini.
What could the placid Deepa have done to put my mother-in-law into such a state?
“She’s pregnant,” my mother-in-law breathes venomously and looks down at me with accusing eyes.
The concrete kitchen floor seems suddenly icy. My knees are ice too. My thighs. Blocks of ice clatter into being in my chest. For the last two years Ramesh and I have been trying assiduously for a baby, but with no success.
How much I want a baby to fill the empty spaces inside me! Somewhere in those unending nights when I lay beside Ramesh trying not to think of Ashok, the longing for a baby swept over my entire being until it became larger than the love I had left behind. I do not know exactly how it happened. Perhaps it was because I felt motherhood was my final chance at happiness. Perhaps I believed it would give me back what wifehood had taken away. Or perhaps it is just that desire lies at the heart of human existence. When we turn away from one desire, we must find another to cleave to with all our strength—or else we die.
Certainly the desire for a grandchild has been central to my mother-in-law’s life as well, though she tries to hold back her anxieties. Still, every month she asks me eagerly if I’ve had my period. And when I nod guiltily, the silent disappointment in her eyes is worse than anything I can imagine her saying.
Today, however, she isn’t silent. “After that woman told me she was going to be a grandmother,” she spits out, “she shook her head with pity. How long has it been since Ramesh has been married? she asked innocently, as though she didn’t know it to the day. My goodness, is it over three years already? I’d get Sudha checked by a doctor, if I were you. Then she broke off to pat her daughter-in-law’s arm. Go and lie down, Deepa Ma, she said, sweet as sugar-water. After all, we wouldn’t want anything to happen to my grandson, would we? I asked her how she could be so sure it was going to be a boy, and she said they’d stopped by at a fancy medical office in Calcutta where they have machines that can look into a woman’s stomach and tell you everything.”
My mother-in-law kicks at the steel bucket, starting up a frantic clatter of claws. All her plans for victory over Aunt Tarini have come to nothing. Even the largest lobster in the world is no match for a grandson, after all.
Then she looks at me, eyes narrowed and speculative, and I see she is not going to give up so easily. She’s making plans, and while she makes them she eyes me with a new coldness, as though I were something inanimate, a rock perhaps in the path of her goal, something for her to climb over. Or blast away.
I BALANCE THE bag of groceries on my hip and brush my short hair from my face as I try to unlock our apartment door. The key sticks in the lock, as usual, and I have to jiggle it—quite a feat, considering that I’m also holding on to Sunil’s newly cleaned jacket. I can feel the bag of groceries beginning to slide. I make a frantic grab at it—there are eggs inside—and lose the jacket. The letters I just got out of our mailbox scatter all over the doormat. Bills, pizza coupons, a computer-generated flyer addressed to Single Resident. Under the Memorial Day sale announcements from Sears I glimpse a distinctive cream envelope. My heart begins to beat unevenly even before I see my name written in my mother’s neat script because lately there’s been no good news from home at all.
“Shit!” I say, bending awkwardly to pick things up. “Shit!” Of all the American terms I’ve avidly gleaned in the three years I’ve been here, it’s my favorite. It’s explosive, exact conciseness expresses how I feel a lot of the time. But I’m careful to use it only when Sunil isn’t around because he thinks it isn’t lady-like. I point out that I hear far worse from him when he’s driving. He claims that’s different.
The door finally opens with a protesting kreek, but I wait a bit before going in. Even now, I don’t like walking into an empty apartment. There’s something about the air—unpeopled and stagnant, like it’s from the bottom of a well that dried up a long time ago—that makes me uncomfortable. That’s when the longing for the house of my childhood shakes me the most. How irritated I used to be at the constant commotion—milkmen, vegetable sellers, Ramur Ma shouting at the neighbor cat who’d sneaked into the kitchen, Pishi calling me to go for my bath. Now I’d be glad to see even the teatime aunties!
Inside, I drop everything on the kitchen table and collapse on the couch. I’ve been out since morning—first I took Sunil to the train station, then I went to my classes, then I caught up on some assignments at the library, then the grocery, then the dry cleaner’s. I’m in a terrible mood—hunger always does that to me. That, and the fact that there’s nothing to eat unless I cook it first. Of the many realizations I’ve had since I came to America, the foremost one is that I hate cooking.
Not that there’s time to cook. I have to pick Sunil up from the station in thirty minutes, and it’ll take me a good fifteen just to get there. So it’ll have to be frozen burritos again. I know what Sunil’s going to say. Well, he won’t really say anything, but he’ll give me that look, as if his life is one big burden and guess who’s responsible. That look always provokes me into a fight, and tonight I don’t want to, I’ve got to save my energies for the letter from India. So I drag myself off the couch and throw together onions and tomatoes and a few spices for a rice casserole to go with the burritos. I leave the stove on low, though Sunil’s warned me that it’s dangerous, wipe my hands on my jeans, and take the steps two at a time. Of course I hit every red light on the way to the station, and the motorist behind me honks and yells “Fucking Eye-ranian” because I’m not quick enough to make a left turn before the signal changes.
It’s not what I imagined my American life would be like.
After dinner—which has turned out surprisingly good, the casserole a success in spite of my cavalier handling of it—we settle down, Sunil at the computer, me on the couch with my books and the letter, which I’m still not ready to deal with. Sunil has put a jazz tape into our old
player. The room fills with notes drawn out like threads of airy gold, at once melancholy and exhilarating. As they seep into me I have to admit that I was being overdramatic earlier. I have a tendency to do that, as Sunil’s pointed out.
Sunil’s shoulders lean eagerly forward as he works on a program. Sometimes I get angry that he pays more attention to a machine than to me, but at other times I watch him, fascinated. There’s something reverent in the absolute attention he gives to the numbers flickering across the neon screen. Watching his fingers move effortlessly across the keyboard, I feel I have a deeper insight into him than if we were merely talking.
I need all the insight I can get, because Sunil’s the original man with a hundred faces. Even after all this time I can’t tell which ones are really his, and which are masks pulled on for effect. He writes devotedly to his mother every week. He never mentions his father, though every month he sends him a sizable money order, more than we can afford. Once I asked him about it and he said, shortly, that he was buying back his freedom. When I was sick last winter he sat up all night, massaging my feet with Vicks, holding a basin for me to throw up in. But another time when I’d run out of writing paper and looked in his desk drawer for some, he yelled at me for not respecting his privacy.
Unlike some of the other Indian husbands I know, Sunil’s always encouraged me to feel comfortable in America. He taught me to drive and introduced me to his colleagues at work. He bought me jeans and hiking boots, and when I said I’d like to see how I look in short hair, he said, “Go for it!” He’s taken me to malls and plays and dance clubs and the ocean. And finally, though money is short, he’s been enthusiastic about my going to college to get a degree in literature.
But when one evening I suggested we read some Virginia Woolf together, he shook his head emphatically.
“All that arty-farty stuff is not for me.”
“But you bought the whole set from our store,” I said, perplexed and disappointed. “I thought you really liked her work.”
“Nah. In the introductory letter your mother had written to us she’d mentioned that she was one of your favorite writers, so I thought that would be a good way to start a conversation.”
My cheeks burned. I felt cheated. Used.
“And then when I saw how you got all fired up about her, I thought it’d be nice to get the whole set for you. It cost little enough in dollars,” said Sunil. He picked up one of his computer journals and leafed casually through it, unaware of—or unconcerned by—my distress. It was obvious he didn’t think of his actions as deceptive.
I thought back to the young man that I’d fallen in love with that day. How the light had shimmered around his cream silk kurta. Now the table lamp threw distorted shadows of our silhouettes on the cramped apartment walls. Was this always how dreams of romance ended? Did the same thought cross Sunil’s mind when he saw, waiting for him across the Caltrain parking lot, a tired, irritable woman with tangly hair and spice-stained jeans?
There are days when Sunil takes the car to work and doesn’t come home until midnight. By then I’m crazy with worry and anger. I know he’s not in the office—or at least he’s not picking up the phone—and when he finally returns and I explode with accusations, he just shrugs and says I have to let him live his life too.
“What does that mean?” I scream at him, holding him by the lapels. “What the hell does that mean?” All the time I’m trying not to examine him for signs—slurred words, the smell of alcohol, or worse, a stranger’s perfume. I’m hating myself for what he’s reduced me to, sniffing at him when he returns like a suspicious bitch. And he’ll pull my hands from him calmly, and go into the bathroom to brush his teeth.
Sometimes I think of leaving Sunil and returning to Calcutta, but I know I never will. It’s not from fear of the gossip I’d have to face, nor because of how sad and anxious Mother would be. It’s not even because a life left behind, cauterized like a wound, cannot be opened up at will for one to step back into.
It’s because in some dark, tangled, needful way I can’t quite fathom, I love Sunil more now than ever before.
What is hardest for me to understand is how Sunil feels toward Sudha. For the longest time we never brought her name up. He’d ask about the mothers from time to time—he’s courteous that way—but he wouldn’t say a word about Sudha, not even when he picked up the mail and there was a letter from her in the stack.
For a while I was happy to have it that way. Our wedding day was still too close to me. In spite of all the times we made love, all the sweet words Sunil whispered afterward into my hair, all I had to do was close my eyes and I could see the look on his face as he stared after Sudha, as he picked up the handkerchief that had fallen from her waistband. I’d never seen that wide-pupiled, out-of-control look on him again, not even at the height of our lovemaking.
But silence has its own insidious power. Because we wouldn’t speak of her, Sudha sat between us on the sofa as we watched TV. Her hand brushed ours at table as we reached for a jug of juice, a carafe of wine. Setting off on a weekend drive, we’d catch her eyes in the rearview mirror, and when at night we lay in bed, we’d have to reach across her phantom body to touch each other. I was afraid of this Sudha we’d created. She wasn’t the cousin I loved, with her fears and fanciful imaginings, the girl who’d wanted so much and settled for so little. This Sudha, frozen in her bridal finery, remote and mythic as the princess in the snake palace—how could I hope to be her equal in any way? How could I claim my husband back from her?
And so I began talking, just a little at a time, telling Sunil about our childhood. The escapades, the punishments. Sunil never said anything, but his entire body would grow still as I spoke, like he was listening with every pore. Still I continued, telling him about Sudha’s reluctant love for her mother, her dreams of creating designer-label clothes, her belief in falling stars. I took special care to paint for him images of Sudha as a wife, how well she played that part, how cherished she was in her new home, and how happy. Perhaps I exaggerated a bit, but it’s only human, isn’t it, to want to protect what belongs to you?
As I spoke, I realized how much I’d been missing Sudha, how much I longed to tell her about my troubles. In my letters, I’d only presented the best and brightest parts of my American existence. Was it out of a desire to save her from worry, or out of a need to let her know what a wonderful marriage Sunil and I had?
Sudha’s letters were no more honest than mine. Sometimes I’d get one, full of a wonderful description of Durga Puja in her in-laws’ home, or telling me how exciting it was when Ramesh took them all to the inauguration of a bridge he’d designed. But these were only surface things, and reading them I’d want to shake her because she wouldn’t let me past them into her real life.
Mother’s letters were a little better, although she minimized everything that might worry me, not realizing that it only made me more anxious. She’d write that she hadn’t been well, and immediately I’d imagine her doubled over with chest pains. She’d write that money was a bit short, and I’d picture the mothers living on rice and water. I’ve asked her a hundred times to sell that white elephant of a house which constantly needs repairs—the land it’s sitting on is worth a great deal—but she always writes back that that’s unthinkable. It’s the only home Pishi knew, and Aunt Nalini as well. She herself had lived there all her adult life, and wanted to die there.
Recently, though, mother’s letters have been mostly about Sudha, and they’re the ones I’m most worried by. That’s why I sit here holding the cream envelope, scared to open it.
The first hint that things might not be well with Sudha came from one of the teatime aunties whose sister lives in Bahrampur and knows Ramesh’s Aunt Tarini. Apparently Aunt Tarini had been going around telling people something must be wrong with Sudha, look how it was four years already and she didn’t have even one baby to show in all that time. Aunt N took the affront personally and was ready to write her a nasty letter saying there was nothi
ng wrong with her daughter, how about their son, but Mother wouldn’t let her. Foolish gossip, she said, is best ignored. Surely if there were a medical problem, or her in-laws were treating her badly, Sudha would have told them.
When I read that, I sighed. My mother’s world was so bounded by the simple, angular lines of honesty that she’d forgotten how it was to be torn by conflicting loyalties.
But a few months later Mrs. Sanyal called Mother to say they were getting a little concerned, nothing to get anxious about, still, they thought they’d take Sudha to see one of the ladies’ doctors in Bardhaman. Mother asked to speak to Sudha, but Sudha answered in monosyllables, saying only, over and over, Don’t worry, I’m okay. But what else could she have said with Mrs. Sanyal listening?
What bothered me most was that all this time I’d been getting letters from Sudha as usual. They were cheerful as ever, and not one had mentioned a word about any of this. I could understand her not wanting to bad-mouth her mother-in-law, but why couldn’t she have written to me of how she felt about not becoming pregnant? Together we would have grieved and raged and thought up a way of coping, as we used to do as girls. The fact that Sudha no longer turned to me when in trouble, that instead she preferred to—there was no other word for it—lie, worked itself deeper and deeper into me, the way Pishi used to say a broken needle tip would if it became embedded in our flesh, not resting until it found our heart.
The doctor in Bardhaman, writes my mother today, pronounced that Sudha was completely normal, and for a few weeks matters seemed to have settled down. But now Sudha’s mother-in-law wants a second opinion. So she’s going to bring Sudha to Calcutta to be checked out by a leading gynecologist.
I’m furious as I read this. I picture Sudha lying on an examining table, the awkward helplessness of her splayed legs, the doctor’s callous hands searching and prodding inside her. How violated she must feel. It makes me shudder with revulsion. For once, I agree with Aunt N—Sudha’s husband should be the one going to the doctor. My books fall to the floor with a thud as I stand up to pace restlessly around the room.