“I think we’ll be very happy in our new place, don’t you?” she tells me as she hangs up. “Be sure to rest well in the afternoon. We’ll put you to work decorating it this evening.” She waves her notes at me as she hurries off. “There’s going to be enough money to buy a very nice cradle for our baby, and you’ll have to decide where to put it.”
Isn’t it funny, I tell my daughter—for she and I have taken to having long conversations nowadays—how we spend so much time holding on to the old ways, not knowing how refreshing change can be? How, like a wind from the Ganga, it can sweep clean all the dust we’ve accumulated in the crannies of our mind?
She nods wisely inside me—already she is wiser than I, this child whose life was almost torn in two in the tug of war between change and the old ways. Isn’t it funny, she adds, that sometimes the thing we’ve feared most, year after year, turns out to be the best thing that could have happened to us?
I think about last week, when the final divorce papers were delivered to me from the court. I looked at the wax seal, colored an ironic sindur-red, scared of how I would react. This was the final disgrace for a woman, the final failure. That was what I had been brought up believing. I waited for despair to break over me like a flood wave—but it didn’t. There was a sense of great tiredness, yes, and some sorrow. I had worked so hard at loving my in-laws, at being a good wife. I felt as though I’d spent years of my life pushing a rock uphill—and the moment I stopped, it rolled right down to the bottom. But there was also a huge relief, and a small hope. I signed my name at the bottom of the form with a flourish, and was surprised to find my mouth curving in a smile. We were starting anew, my daughter and I, and because there were no roles charted out for us by society, we could become anything we wanted.
It’s from moments like this that history is made, I tell my daughter, as much as it is from wars and treaties and the deaths of kings. But most times we don’t realize it.
She begins to reply, but at that moment Ramur Ma shouts from downstairs, “O Sudha Didi, Gouri Ma wants you to come to the living room. Someone’s here to see you.”
How inconvenient, I say to my daughter, wiping my hands on my dust-streaked sari. Just when I was about to go for a bath. Who do you think it could it be?
I have no idea, she says, sounding as irritated as I at the interruption.
With all its furniture gone, the living room is a cavernous emptiness, echoing under my steps. It takes a moment for my eyes to get accustomed to its shuttered dark. And then I see, on one of the two wicker moras that Ramur Ma must have set up hastily, a man is sitting. And even before I recognize his face, gaunter than before, and bearded, I know him by his white shirt.
The ground buckles up around my feet. I have to hold on to the wall.
“Sudha,” says Ashok, and his voice is the same as years ago, the brown-sugar voice that I kept strenuously from my dreams all through my marriage, all through the breaking up of it.
I wonder at the fact that the mothers have allowed him into the house. Is it because I no longer have a reputation left to lose? Or could it be something else? But I cannot think straight. My heart beats erratically, as though I were still that naive girl in the cinema hall, balanced on the threshold of adulthood, my eyes dazzled by its neon magic. My foolish heart, as though the world has not taught me a hundred bitter lessons since then. It makes me infuriated with myself.
Perhaps that’s why my voice comes out harsher than I intended. “Why did you come here, Ashok? Is it to look down on me in my time of trouble, and say, If only you’d listened to me? Well, let me tell you, though this isn’t how I expected my life to turn out, I’ve no regrets for what has happened. None. And I’m not ready to give up either. I’m going to fight for my daughter and myself, and I’m going to win.”
Ashok is taken aback by my attack—I can see it in the hurt surprise in his eyes. “I’m not here to gloat. How could you think that?”
“I don’t want your pity either,” I say belligerently. That would be even worse, somehow—to see pity in the eyes that had once looked at me as though I were truly a princess out of a fairy tale.
“I’m not here to offer you my pity.” Now he’s smiling a little. The gentleness with which he speaks only makes me want to cry. And that would be worst of all, to burst into tears in front of Ashok. I turn to leave. I will keep my dignity, even if I have nothing else.
“Stop, please.” Now he’s off the mora, standing in front of me, his hands held up. But he doesn’t touch me, nor I him. This much, at least, the years have taught us. “Aren’t you even going to give me a chance to tell you why I came?”
I push past him.
“Sudha!” he calls from behind me, part laughing, part exasperated. “You’re as stubborn as ever!”
I almost stop. I want to tell him he is mistaken. Or maybe he never knew me. Just as I never really knew him. I am not stubborn. I am quiet, forbearing, gullible and dutiful. That is why he is not the father of the baby I am carrying.
“I wanted to say this properly, not blurt it out to your back, but you give me no choice. Sudha, I want to marry you.”
An incredulous joy spurts up in me, but I will not give myself to it. It must be a mistake—of Ashok’s tongue, or my ears. And even if he did say what he said, he might regret it in a moment—or a week, or a year. And then how could I bear it?
“Why would you want to marry me?” I speak roughly, gesturing toward my ungainly belly, my bare forehead. “Why would anyone?”
“Am I just anyone?” Ashok says, but I notice that his eyes shift away from my stomach. “I’ve been asking myself the same thing ever since Singhji told me you’d come back home. Because I knew, that very minute, what I was going to do. And the answer is, I can’t imagine being happy with anyone else. After your wedding, my parents tried many times to get me to marry. They arranged gatherings where I’d run into attractive young women. They even persuaded me to attend a few bride-viewings. I was so angry with you, I almost agreed to get married, just to spite you, to show you I didn’t care. Thank God I came to my senses before I ruined another life along with my own.
“Instead, I threw myself into the family business. In my spare time I took up sports, went mountain climbing. Parachuting. The riskiest things I could think of. I hoped they’d keep my mind off you. Nothing worked. You were an obsession, a drug in my blood.
“I tortured myself further by meeting with Singhji and making him tell me everything he knew about your married life. I hated your husband, that monkey with a pearl necklace around his neck. I couldn’t stop picturing him with you—even though it made me feel like someone was squeezing my throat in both his hands—at small, intimate moments. Accepting a cup of tea from you, putting out his hand to tuck a stray strand of hair behind your ear as though it was his right. When I heard your in-laws were pressuring you because you weren’t pregnant, I wanted you to have a baby and be happy. But not really. What I really wanted was your marriage to fail. I wanted you to have no one but me to love.” He shuts his eyes and presses his fingertips into his temples, and when he opens them, uncertainty blends with shame in his eyes. The beginnings of age lines bracket his mouth, and a muscle jumps nervously in his cheek. I see that he is no prince after all, though he has tried manfully to be one because I wanted it so. He is human, like me, racked by the same demons, the same treacherous need.
I walk into his arms then, and it is as though I have completed a movement I began long ago in the Kalighat temple, one of those complicated dance sequences which take you all the way across the stage before you can return to where you started. I touch his chest. In spite of its tumultuous rise and fall it seems a solid place, a place where one may build a shelter to last a lifetime.
We sit on the steps of Outram Ghat and watch the long tremble of the ferryboat’s lights moving across the darkening waters of the Ganga. It is evening. The street lamps cast warm yellow pools of glowing around us, the jhi-jhi bugs chirp sleepily. We talk a little, Ashok and
I, but we are not uncomfortable with silence. It is enough to be with him. To touch his hand—its square knuckles, its slight rasp of hair—is to be filled with the presence of miracle. So much of what we might speak of is external anyway. Secondary. The events of our lives have marked us, yes, but they have not changed our essential selves, no more than an avalanche changes the rock-heart of the mountain slope over which it crashes.
When a distant clock chimes eight, we rise, Ashok helping me carefully to my feet. The mothers do not like me to stay out late, although now that our wedding is merely a matter of time, they have no objection to us seeing each other.
Ashok maneuvers himself around my belly so he can embrace me. Inside me, I feel my daughter squirm. Suspicious of men—as she has ample cause to be—she has not been entirely happy with this recent development. You’ll like him, I tell her. He’ll be a good father to you. She maintains a mutinous silence. At opportune moments—such as this one—she kicks out hard.
“Oof!” says Ashok. “Not again! I’m beginning to think she doesn’t want me anywhere near you!”
I laugh. He joins in, but it is an edgy sound. On the way home, he does not touch me again.
Last week Ashok brought his parents to meet me. His father, in whom I see how Ashok will look in twenty years, did not speak much, but his smile was kind. His mother took my hands in hers and squeezed them tightly. In a voice soft as rain she told me how delighted she was to see Ashok marrying at last.
“He’s loved you for so long, my dear. Sometimes nowadays I wake up at night and he’s standing by the hall window. I ask him what the matter is and he tells me he’s too excited, there’s a hot, sparkly feeling in his chest, the night is so magical with its moonlit clouds, how can anyone just lie in bed.”
“Mother!” Ashok protested, laughing. “You’re giving all my secrets away. Now Sudha’s going to be impossible to live with.”
I love watching Ashok’s hands as he drives. The deft, minimal turns of his wrist. The way he rests two fingers lightly on the steering wheel as the car glides ahead, smooth as a swan. Sometimes he drives with only one hand and brings my hand to his lips with the other. He kisses each separate finger, then the hollow of my palm.
Oh, Anju, how I wish you were here so I could tell you face to face how it feels. Whoever knew that when I scrubbed away what the Bidhata Purush had written on my forehead, I would uncover this? A rosy happiness has dyed my body through and through. Happiness beyond deserving. It frightens me.
“But will you be happy with me?” I ask Ashok. “I’m no longer that star-eyed girl you fell in love with. I don’t think I can trust anyone so completely ever again. I don’t know if I can love anyone except my daughter so completely.” A frown marks Ashok’s face as I say this, but I force myself to continue. “And my past—it’ll always be there, reminding you that my body was another man’s first. Will you be able to live with the fact that when I came to you I was no longer a virgin?”
“Did you love him?”
I consider the question. I have felt affection for Ramesh, and often pity. At times we have been comrades pitted against a stronger, more ruthless force. But love? No.
“Then I can live with it,” says Ashok. I want to believe the sureness in his voice. I will believe it.
Our kisses are long and starved and urgent, they are full and sharp as wild fennel. They are golden as butter in sunshine. We kiss with a strange urgency, as though we do not have a lifetime of kissing ahead. Is it because, being older, we know how grudgingly the world hands out its gifts, how eager it is to snatch them back?
Tonight when we have reached the apartment and I am about to get down from his car, Ashok catches my hand and holds it against his mouth. I feel little puffs of heat on my fingertips, his delicious breath. Then he says, “Do you truly believe in honesty between lovers?”
“Of course.”
“Then I must tell you something that has been tormenting me the last few days, and you must promise to consider my request.”
I nod nervously. The car is suddenly full of shadow, like the bottom of the sea on a stormy day. What can it be? Perhaps he wants a big wedding? Perhaps it’s something to do with his family? Whatever he wants, I cannot imagine denying it to him.
He looks out across the sea-shadows, hiding his emotions—as men do—behind his darkened, distant gaze.
“I’m no saint, you must remember, just an ordinary man with my own limitations.”
Is he about to confess to a secret vice? A mistress? An illegitimate child that he wants me to take in as my own? No matter. If he can accept my past, I can accept his.
“While I don’t care about your previous marriage”—Ashok looks away as he speaks—”I don’t think I can welcome your daughter as fully as she deserves.”
I am too shocked even to pull my hand away from his. “What do you mean?” Disks of dizzy light flash across my vision.
“Please, Sudha.” Ashok speaks pleadingly, rapidly. “Don’t be angry. It’s better that I speak the truth now, rather than have it come out later through a hundred veiled resentments. I discussed this already with your Aunt Gouri, who’s a very intelligent woman. She understood me completely and agreed that it’s the best thing for us. You and I need to be alone, at least in the beginning, so we can build a strong relationship. The mothers will be happy to keep your daughter and make sure she never lacks for love. I promise I’ll give her every opportunity that money can bring. You can visit her whenever you want. Perhaps, after we’ve had little ones of our own, she could even come and stay with us, like a dear niece. No, Sudha, don’t push me away like that. Think about it, please. Talk about it with your mother and aunts. You promised me you’d consider it—”
“I’ll consider it,” I say tonelessly. Somewhere inside me a tornado swoops down, lifting a matchstick house into an exploding sky. Shards fall like rain, piercing my skin, thorning the ground. In dreams begin follies, says a voice like a forgotten poem. I walk carefully through the thorns, one foot in front of the other, not looking back. Behind me the car door sighs shut.
I LOVE WORKING. No. To be honest, the work part is so-so. What I really love is earning my own money. What a feeling of power it gives me to take my own check to the bank and put it into my own account! The first time I got my check, I made the teller cash the entire amount into one-dollar bills. I held the pile of money in my hands for a whole minute, breathing in that green scent, the scent of freedom, and then I gave it all back to her to deposit into my account.
“Why’d you do that?” she asked, obviously annoyed.
“To make it real,” I said. She stared at me. I could tell what she was thinking. Crazy foreigner.
I don’t think the American students who work with me at the college library would understand it either. They’re constantly bitching about how tired they are, how work doesn’t leave them enough time to have fun. They joke about wanting a rich uncle who’d pay their bills so they wouldn’t have to lug carts of library books up to the stacks. They’d probably laugh their heads off if I told them how, growing up in India, I’d have given anything to be allowed to work at our bookstore. How it didn’t always feel so good to be given everything I needed. How sometimes I’d wanted to be able to give too.
Since getting married I’ve felt this more and more. Not that I can accuse Sunil of stinginess. When money’s short, he’ll do without things rather than ask me to cut back. I can feel the strain it puts on him, though, so once or twice I offered to take up a job. But he got all huffy and said he’s quite capable of feeding his own wife, thank you. If that isn’t a typical Indian male!
That’s why I’ve had to be so careful about keeping this job a secret, only working weekday hours—though weekends pay better—and opening an account at a different bank. I’ve even asked my supervisor not to call me at home, though it embarrassed me no end to do that. But my supervisor, an older black woman who looks like she might’ve been through troubles of her own, had nodded understandingly and not
asked any awkward questions. I’m beginning to think I won’t even tell Sunil about Sudha’s tickets—I’ll just send them to her and swear her to secrecy. I shudder when I think of tax time, when I’ll have to hand him my W-2. But, like the heroine of one of my favorite books says, Tomorrow is another day. I’ve got plenty of other things to worry about right now.
Today I’m particularly worried because when I go for my monthly checkup, the doctor isn’t pleased at all. My blood pressure’s still too high, he says, and my sugar doesn’t look good at all. Have I been eating what I should, and at the proper intervals?
I hang my guilty head. I do pretty well early in the day. Even when I have to go straight from class to work, I pack myself apples or an egg sandwich, things I can eat on the run. But by the time I get home, I’m tired and cranky. That’s when I’ll eat half a jar of sweet chutney, or a big bowl of ice cream. It’s the least I deserve, I’ll tell myself, refusing to listen to the scolding voice in my head. Then when Sunil comes home and makes us a virtuous, balanced meal of rice and low-salt dal and such, I’ll only pick at it, complaining that it’s too boring and bland.
Maybe I’m under too much stress, the doctor continues sternly. Maybe I should consider dropping out of school for a quarter.
“I can’t do that,” I tell him, horrified.
“Why not?”
I stare at him mutely. How can I explain to him how hugely important college is for me, a second lease on life after the first had been snatched away from me in India? How can I explain how hard Sunil and I had worked on our budget in order to pay for these classes? Or that—perhaps worst of all—if I dropped out of school, I’d no longer be eligible for the library job, and all my dreams of having Sudha start a new life here with me would be shattered?