God! Something awful must have happened for him to come home early like this. Did he get laid off? I’m ashamed of the selfish thoughts that begin to explode one after another inside me like a string of firecrackers at Kali Puja: Will the insurance still cover my delivery? What’ll I feed our baby? And, I’ll never be able to bring Sudha over now.
“What’s wrong?” I whisper finally, sitting down. I reach out to touch Sunil’s shoulder, but he shoves my hand away.
“Nothing’s wrong with me,” he says in a hard voice.
“Why are you home early then?”
“I had to visit a client close by, so I just took a cab home. I tried to call you—I left several messages”—he jerks his chin at the answering machine—”but you were nowhere around.”
“I fell asleep at the library.”
“Sure you did!” Sunil’s voice is heavy with sarcasm.
I look at him in surprise. “What do you mean?”
“Then what’s this?” he says, and jabs at the answering machine button. “I found this when I tried to erase my messages.”
“Anju,” says a female American voice. “I hope I got the right number for you—you didn’t have it on file.” It takes me a moment to realize that it’s the woman who sometimes fills in for my supervisor. My heart gives a sick lurch. “Sorry to disturb you at home, but we’re desperate. Three of the stackers have come down with the flu, and with exam week just around the corner, the library’s a mess. I know you don’t like to work weekends, but could you possibly come in for a few hours tomorrow? Call me as soon as you get this message—”
If thunder could whisper, it would sound like Sunil’s voice. “How long has this been going on? And why? What did you need so badly that you had to get the money for it secretly, like this?” There’s a desperate hurt beneath the anger in his eyes.
“It’s for Sudha,” I blurt out. “I’m saving for her ticket. I had to do it this way because you didn’t want to help.” Someone seems to be pulling apart the bones of my lower back with both hands. If only this were all over, and I could go lie down.
I expect an outburst from Sunil, but he’s oddly silent. In the darkening evening, an expression flits over his face, gone before I can catch it.
“You had to meddle, didn’t you?” he says finally. A cracked tiredness runs through his voice. “You couldn’t leave well enough alone.”
“What do you mean, meddle?” I say. I’m tired, too—too tired for fighting, too tired for diplomacy. “Sudha’s my sister, the person I love most in the world. You yourself told me how hard life would be for her in India, now that she’s now married anymore. How can I just leave her there to suffer?”
“Go to bed, Anju,” says Sunil with a sigh. “You look awful. Now I know why you’ve been so tired and irritable these last months—you’re working yourself to death. I’ll bring you some hot soup, and then I’ll call that woman and tell her you’re quitting.”
I jump to my feet with the last of my strength. “You’ll do no such thing,” I cry. “I’m not quitting. I’m perfectly fine. I will keep working. I will bring Sudha to America, whether you want it or not.”
“Please, Anju,” says Sunil. “Go lie down. You’re all worked up.”
“Don’t treat me like a child.” I’m shouting now, gasping for breath. Someone’s smashing the bones of my pelvis with a steel hammer. “I won’t let you control me like your father controls your mother. I won’t let you—”
And then the pain’s so bad I have to double over, but not before I’ve seen the stricken look in Sunil’s eyes. There’s a sticky wetness between my legs, a dark stain begins to spread down my pants. There’s a smell like rusting metal in the air. Did I lose control over my bladder?
Sunil mutters something as he grabs the phone.
“No,” I cry, lunging to knock it from him.
“Stop it, Anju,” he says, trying to ward me off with his free hand. “Calm down. I’m not calling your work. I’m calling an ambulance.”
The firecrackers explode inside me once more, taking me with them.
When I come to, the pain is intense, a hot light that blinds me even through the dull haze of medication. But worse is the hollow feeling I have, that sense that it’s too late.
When I get up the courage, I touch my belly. Low down, there are bandages, seals of a disaster I’ve somehow stupidly slept through. And though I’m still swollen, I can tell my baby is gone.
I’m not sure what happens next. The tears which stream their course down the sides of my face until they pool into my ears like warm blood. Or the crisp, starched nurse who smiles an unbearably cheerful smile and comments on the fact that I’m awake. Or the screams that spurt out independent of my will because inside my throat there’s a bottomless fountain, as in the tales Pishi used to tell when I was too young to understand that life can be crueler than any story. Or the hands holding me down, the needle piercing my flesh, the burning squirt of more numbing medication. But finally there’s Sunil, stroking my hair, saying I must be brave.
“Tell me,” I say. My voice is a hoarse, grating thing. It shows nothing of the helpless rage building to explosion inside me. When Sunil hesitates, I grasp his hand with all the strength I can call up, letting my nails sink in. I want him to hurt, to feel at least a pale echo of what I’m feeling. “Tell me everything.”
They’d rushed me, bleeding heavily, to the hospital. They’d brought me to an operating room as soon as they could, and performed a C-section. But by then his heartbeat had stopped.
“I want to see him,” I whisper, but Sunil shakes his head. The body’s been sent away already. Even otherwise, the doctor had advised against it. The best thing for me would be to put the whole incident behind me as soon as I could—and this way, the baby would be less of a reality.
Oh, the stupidity of men. I’d held him inside me for six months. I’d talked to him every day since I knew he was there. He’d pulsed against my flesh with the minute brightness of a star, giving me guidance and courage. Through the thin lining of my skin, I’d touched the curve of his head. Nothing they did could lessen the wrenching reality of what he’d meant to me.
I try to argue with Sunil, but my tongue’s heavy from the tranquilizer, and I see from his eyes that he’s made his decision.
It’s hard to form words with lips numb as leather. But I must know one more thing before I go under. “What did he look like?” I ask. The sounds are so slurred I’m afraid Sunil won’t understand, but he does.
“He was beautiful, with tiny hands like starfish.”
Sunil’s eyes grow unfocused, remembering. The softness with which my usually unpoetic husband speaks startles me. “Something had been wrong with the cord, it had cut off the oxygen, so he was blue—like a—baby Krishna.”
I’m amazed, again, at his words. But of course they’re exactly right. I can see the translucent blueness of my baby’s skin glowing through the darkness of my tight-shut eyes.
“He was so beautiful,” Sunil repeats. The bitterness in his voice pries my eyelids open. A brilliant rage is flickering over his face, like electricity in a storm cloud.
I know then I was mistaken earlier. Hearts break in different ways, a father’s no less than a mother’s.
“My baby, I killed him.”
I’m not sure whether I’ve spoken the words or only thought them from within the hot bands of steel that are squeezing my throat. But from the sudden, profound stillness of Sunil’s body I know he’s heard me.
“Don’t be silly, Anju,” he says, after a pause.
That pause—the enormous, accusing weight of that pause. It makes me turn my face into the antiseptic smell of the hospital pillow and shut my eyelids tight, tight, tight.
I’m not going to open them ever again.
THEY TRIED to keep the news from me because they were afraid of what I might do, but I suspected. I smelled it in the air of the flat, cold suddenly in spite of the blistering April sun outside. Cold and heavy with the smell
of white chrysanthemums, though it wasn’t the season for them. White chrysanthemums, the kind we drape over bodies at funerals. Sometimes I would wake at night and think I heard sobs from Gouri Ma’s room. I would walk over, and she would be sleeping, the bedspread covering her face—but too soundly, not responding when I called her. And there hadn’t been a letter from Anju in over a month.
“She must be busy, or maybe just not in the mood—you know how pregnant women get sometimes,” says Pishi when I tell her how worried I am. “Your job right now is to eat well and rest well and exercise properly, and most of all, to not worry.”
“But don’t you think we should at least call?”
“Actually, Sunil called the other morning, when you were out for your morning walk—”
“How is it you didn’t tell me?” I ask, annoyed.
Pishi sighs. “I’m getting old—I guess I forget things sometimes.” She does look old suddenly, and weary. The skin under her eyes hangs loose and purple. Has her arthritis been acting up again, keeping her awake at night? “Anyway, they’re both doing quite well, so you can stop being so anxious.”
I peer at her eyes—are they more red-rimmed than usual?—but she avoids my gaze and goes off for her bath.
When another week passes without a letter from Anju, I call. I call at our usual time, morning in India, evening in America. Anju is always back home by now, fixing dinner and grumbling about it. But this time no one picks up the phone, and though I leave her a message, she doesn’t call me back.
“That’s strange,” I tell the mothers after a couple of days have passed. “Surely Anju would call back—after all, I hardly ever phone her. She must have known it was important.”
“Maybe they’ve gone on vacation,” offers my mother.
But I’m not satisfied. I’m going to call again, I decide. When the mothers are not in the house.
The mothers have been unusually reluctant to leave me alone recently, so I have to wait until it is time for our weekly trip to the temple. We all get ready to go, and then I tell them I am too tired.
“Come on—it’s not far,” my mother insists. “It’s bad luck to say you’ll go to the temple and then change your mind.”
“We can take a taxi,” Gouri Ma says.
I yawn loudly. “I really think I need to take a nap.”
“Maybe I should stay with you,” Pishi says.
“No, no. Please go, all of you, and pray for Dayita and me. I’ll just be lying down anyway.”
By the time I convince them to leave, it is almost noon. Midnight in California. I am sorry I have to disturb Anju, but this way she will certainly be home.
Sunil is the one who picks up the phone, his voice sleepily bewildered and young. A voice I would not have recognized—it has been so long—if I had not known. I feel a moment’s awkwardness—the last time we spoke was on that ill-fated afternoon in the garden—but I push it away. I am calling because of Anju, I tell myself firmly. Besides, we are both adults now and have been through enough of life’s hardships to know which things deserve our care, which are best left alone. When I tell him who I am, he pauses—is he too thinking of the jasmine arbor?—then says somewhat abruptly that Anju is sleeping. He doesn’t want to disturb her—she doesn’t sleep very well nowadays. “I’ll tell her you called,” he says, sounding as if he is about to hang up.
“Wait,” I call, “wait,” and then like a thunderclap an idea comes to me. It is worth a try—at least this way I will know if I have been worrying needlessly all this while, as the mothers claim. “Is Anju doing better now?”
I cross my fingers as I speak. Please God, let Sunil say, What on earth are you talking about?
Instead he says, in a startled voice, “So they’ve told you! I thought they weren’t going to until your delivery. No, she’s not better. In fact, she’s worse than she was right after she lost the baby.”
The words strike me like a fist in the center of my chest, knocking the air out of me. When I can breathe again, it is a wheezy, jerking sound, and I cover the mouthpiece so Sunil will not hear it. Oh, Anju, Anju! How did this happen? And I nowhere near you to help at this terrible time.
“I’ve only told Anju’s mother a little bit of this—I know she has a bad heart—but I’m going crazy keeping it all to myself,” says Sunil. “She won’t get out of bed. Actually, the sofa. That’s where she sleeps nowadays. She won’t take her antidepressants. I’ll set the tablets out by her plate when I leave for work, and when I come back they’ll still be sitting there. She’s lost a lot of weight—when I take her hand, it feels like a very old woman’s, with the skin sliding over the bones. She’ll only eat if I actually spoon the food into her mouth.”
The words pour through the phone and widen into a pool around me. Now they are rising past my ankles, my shins. “And she won’t talk. She hasn’t spoken a single word since I brought her home. She blames herself, I think. I tell her she mustn’t— but my words have no effect on her. Once I tried to tell her how much I was suffering too”—here Sunil pauses, clears his throat—”I thought that would break the barrier between us—but she just covered her head with the pillow. That’s the same thing she does whenever I ask if she’d like to go visit her mother in India. The doctor wants to put her in a nursing home for a while, but when he told her about it during our last visit, her whole body started shaking, and her eyes went wild and skittery, like a trapped animal’s. I can’t bear the thought of sending her away. But I don’t know what else to do. I don’t have any more leave left and she isn’t getting any better.”
I find I am hugging my stomach tightly, as though Dayita too would slip away otherwise, like my beautiful, elusive Prem.
Not now, Sudha. Think only of Anju now.
“Maybe you can help,” Sunil says. “Can you?”
I think desperately. The inside of my head is filled with a roaring sound like a distant fire, with whirries of dust raised by the Bidhata Purush’s furious passing. And then I know.
“Is she awake now?” I ask. “Then put the phone to her ear.”
He does it, and I start speaking. The inside of my mouth is caked with dust. Dust embroiders the lining of my lungs. It presses down upon me like an unkept promise, it sucks up my voice. But I make myself go on.
“Once there was a princess who spent her girlhood in a crumbling marble palace set around with guards. They told her what was proper and what was not, and held up their poison spears before her face if she attempted to stray outside the boundaries they had drawn for her. When she was old enough, she married, obediently, the king they had selected for her. The firecrackers at the wedding were so loud that no one could hear if her heart was breaking. And when she got to her husband’s house, she had no trouble adjusting, for it was exactly the same as the house she’d grown up in, except that the guards were fiercer, and their spear tips more poisonous.
“All went well with the marriage until the queen was due to give birth. Then a soothsayer discovered that the baby was a girl. Aghast at the idea that their future ruler might be a woman, the guards aimed their poison spears at the queen’s belly so they could destroy the baby before she could be born. The king, petrified with fear, could do nothing to protect her.”
I stumble over the painful words. This is not the story I had meant to tell Anju. But it has taken its own necessary shape, and I must follow where it leads.
“The queen was terrified too, but she placed her hands on her belly to gather courage from her unborn daughter. And she felt something being passed into her hands through the wall of the womb. Looking down, she saw it was a sword, a flaming sword made of light, and then another, one for each hand. Whirling the swords around her head like the Goddess Durga, like the Rani of Jhansi, the queen left the palace, and none dared prevent her.
“Along the way the queen met many people, but though they loved her and her newborn daughter, they were frightened by the thought of the guards who might be pursuing them. Still others were made uneasy by the unea
rthly brightness that emanated from them both by this time, for suffering and courage calls forth that brightness in us. Thus none dared to give them shelter.
“The queen kept searching for a new home. Some days her heart was low and she wondered if her daughter and she were doomed to travel the earth ceaselessly, but she never gave up. Until the day she reached the ocean’s edge and there was no place further for her to go.”
I come to a halt. The words I’ve been following through the labyrinth of memory like Theseus followed his ball of string have run out. What shall I do now?
Then, very softly, I hear Anju’s voice. “But suddenly the queen heard someone say, ‘Don’t worry, dear one. Reach for my hand.’ And looking up she saw a rainbow that extended all the way from the other side of the earth to her. You see, in all this turmoil, the queen had forgotten that she had a twin sister who lived in the land across the ocean. The sister was sending her all her love in the form of this rainbow—”
Anju’s voice falters, but I take up the story. “The queen held her daughter with one hand and with the other she grasped the rainbow. And her sister pulled her across the ocean, over the gaping jaws of sea monsters, to safety.”
Anju is crying now. “Oh, Sudha,” she says between sobs, “I need you. I need you so much. I’m starved for you. I was trying so hard to get the money together for your ticket, but I messed everything up.”
Oh God! Was that why Anju had the miscarriage? She was working for me, unfortunate me. What have I ever brought her except ill luck?
“Please come,” Anju says. “Promise me you’ll come at once.”
I am shaken by how feeble she sounds, how pitiable. It is how I would have sounded, once upon a time, before I learned that mothers cannot afford fear.