I flick the lid open unthinkingly, expecting it to be empty, but it isn’t. A wisp of cloth flutters from it—a handkerchief, my wedding handkerchief, that delicate white lawn bordered with embroidered good-luck lotuses. I bury my face in it, trying to recall that far-off day. It seems I smell the marriage-fire, the priest’s reedy, chanting voice, the turmeric rubbed into my skin for luck. The smell of a long-dissipated dream. Did I put the handkerchief in that box? Recently my mind’s been like a sieve. But no, I remember quite clearly putting it into the top drawer of the dresser in my bedroom in Sunil’s father’s house. Sunil must have taken it from there before he came away to America. Who would have thought he was such a romantic!
I tuck the handkerchief into my bra. At dinner I’ll take it out with a flourish, tease Sunil about it. It’s been a long time since we’ve had something to laugh about.
Then a terrible doubt takes hold of me. I spread out the handkerchief and examine the initial in the corner, looped in silk thread red as danger, red as betrayal and bitter blood. Just as I’d expected in the deep, hopeless cavern of my heart, it’s a B for Basudha.
How could I have forgotten, even for a breath-beat? Is it that the mind, in order to survive, blacks out moments that would otherwise drive it mad?
The scene shivers to life before my eyes once again, as it did so many times during the bittersweet month after my wedding, those nights I lay awake after lovemaking, wondering of whom Sunil had been thinking as he groaned his pleasure between my breasts.
The wedding dinner is over. We rise. Ramesh and Sudha walk ahead, his arm under her reluctant elbow. She pulls out a handkerchief to wipe her face. She replaces it—but no, it falls behind the table. No one notices Sunil bending to pick it up. To slip it into his pocket where he fists his hand around it. No one except me.
Now I hold the handkerchief to my trembling lips. It smells faintly, sweetly of my cousin’s body. I wait for the old jealousy to bare its fangs, but all I feel is despair. How many times had Sunil tried to stop me from bringing Sudha over to America? How many hints had he given? Why can’t you leave well enough alone? I’d thought he was being selfish, stingy. But he’d only been trying to save me.
There’s a roaring in my ears like opened floodgates. You don’t have a choice anymore, says my husband’s voice as I’m swept away. Oh, Sudha, now that you’re already halfway to America in your mind, what shall we do now?
ONCE WHEN Anju and I were children, Gouri Ma took us to the Maidan fair. We loved everything about it, from the smell of boiling molasses at the sweets stand to the brightly colored parrots the bird vendor carried around in cages hung from poles. Best of all we liked the nagordola, the huge Ferris wheel. It would start off creakily, excruciatingly slow, so that we’d stamp our feet and cry, Faster, faster. But soon enough our car was hurtling around, the earth disappearing somewhere below, the sky opening around us in a rush, then earth, then sky, then earth again, until we screamed for the wheel to stop its relentless spinning. Yet when it did, we ran as quickly as we could, dizzy and stumble-footed, to stand in line for another ride.
These last few weeks I feel as if I am on that nagordola. After I said no to Ashok, how painfully time dragged its crippled body along. The desire to be gone built like steam inside my heart until I was ready to explode. Faster, faster, I chafed until the giant Ferris wheel of the days finally picked up speed and became a mad blur of shopping-packing-tickets-passports-inoculations. Not until this morning at the airport, when I feel the mothers’ love pulling at me like a river pulls at your body just before you climb out, do I realize the dismaying finality of this moment. My time is up, and unlike that day at the fair, I cannot pay my coin and climb on again. What I am leaving behind—I cannot articulate what it is, but I know I will not find it, ever, in America. The mothers kiss me, their lips damp and cool on my forehead, that childhood smell of Binaca toothpaste, and I wish I had not been in such a hurry to go.
At the entrance to the security area, Singhji hands me my carry-on bag. It’s heavy with Dayita’s things, nappies and bottles of juice and extra outfits—how many items such a little person needs!—but wedged into a corner I catch a glimpse of a packet wrapped in brown paper and tied with string.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“Oh, nothing,” say the mothers, “but be careful, don’t lose it.” They wipe at their eyes with their sari edges as they whisper blessings. Goddess Durga keep you. May you be always happy. And brave as the Rani of Jhansi. When I reach for the packet to see what is inside, they swat my hand away with mock-frowns. “Wait until you get on the plane,” they say.
I have been overwhelmed by gifts and good wishes all week. So many from people who I thought did not care, so many from people whose love I had done little to deserve. But then, love is never about deserving, is it? Nor is hate. I learned that from my mother-in-law. The teatime aunties brought jars of lemon achar for me and gripe water for Dayita. Neighbors from down the street gave me filmi magazines to read on the plane and churan mix in case I felt airsick. Sunil’s mother, as sweet and timid as ever, stopped by with a hand-knitted blanket for Dayita and a message. “Tell Sunil not to send any more money,” she whispered. “They need it more than we do. His father’s sorry about what happened, but he’s too proud to ever admit it. Maybe if Sunil called—? Will you try to persuade him?” Her stricken doe-eyes held mine until I nodded uneasy agreement.
Ramur Ma and Singhji presented me with a silver dish-and-bowl set for Dayita, with her name carved into the edge.
“But it’s too expensive!” I said, appalled at the thought of how much of their savings such a gift must have eaten into.
“Oh hush,” said Ramur Ma. “Just be sure to send us photos of Daya Moni when she gets old enough to eat from them.”
Ashok tried to give me back his diamond ring. When I would not accept it, he gave me a plastic card embossed with my name.
“It’s a credit card,” he explained.
I knew about credit cards—Anju had written to me about them—but I hadn’t known one could get them in India.
“They’ve just started issuing them,” he said. “You can use it in America, and the bill will be sent to me here. I don’t want you ever to run out of money, or feel dependent on anyone.” He paused, and I wondered if he meant Sunil, and whether by the keenness sometimes given to lovers he sensed my ambivalence toward him. But he couldn’t—how could he? I had been very careful to say nothing.
“I want you to be able to give Dayita everything she needs—and most important, to be able to buy a ticket whenever you decide you’re ready to come back home.” He pressed the card into my hand. “To me,” he added.
I started to protest, but he said, “Please—just think of it as a kindness you’re doing me, because otherwise I’d be worrying about you every day.”
I took it then, but though I appreciated his concern, inside me I vowed I would never use it. Once I had depended on a man who clapped his hands over his ears and said, Please, Sudha, let me be. It was my own feet I wanted to stand on now.
Late last night, when the mothers had finished helping me pack my suitcases, Gouri Ma handed me a letter. From the fancy embossed envelope I could see it was a wedding card. “This came a few days ago,” she said, her voice cautious. The glitter in her eyes—I could not tell if it was pain or anger. “Didi and Nalini wanted me to destroy it right away, but I felt I did not have the right to.”
Even before I saw the Bardhaman postmark, I knew what it was. I knew it with the same kind of instinct that makes you snatch your hand away from a scorpion though no one has warned you yet of what it might do. A wedding announcement for Ramesh. Sent by my mother-in-law. One last swipe from her poisonous claw.
Ah, how much spite that woman had pent up within her.
“My poor Sudha, are you very upset?” Pishi asked. She put out a hand to knead my stiff, high shoulders.
I was. It was not because Ramesh was getting remarried. After all, I myself had briefl
y considered the same thing. I suspected the marriage was more his mother’s idea, anyway. She would have gone around and around him like the grinding stones we use to crush wheat, What about your duty to the Sanyal family, what about me, I’m too old to run this household all by myself, until one day he covered his ears and said, okay, okay, do what you want. But to send me this card—I could hear her voice between the beautifully looped gold characters on it, taunting me. See how easily you can be replaced, see what a catch my son is, see what an enormous mistake you made, leaving him. My skin smarted from it as from a sudden slap.
I took a deep breath, let it out. I could not afford to add the weight of old resentments to all that I was carrying already with me to my new life. My mother was saying something about the gall of that woman, you’d think she’d at least have had the decency to return Sudha’s wedding jewelry, now that she’s getting a whole new dowry along with a new daughter-in-law, it’ll serve her right if Ramesh’s second wife turns out to be a shrew. I lifted my arm wearily to stop her.
“Let it be,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.” I did not really feel that way, not yet. But saying the words brought me a moment of ease, as though after having spent hours climbing up a dark, stale stairwell, I had felt on my face a riffle of night air. It gave me hope that with time I would grow into their truth.
The inside of the airplane is quite beautiful, like something out of a movie, all plush maroon walls and shiny fixtures and air hostesses with lacquered smiles. It is the moment I have dreamed of for weeks, but I am too curious to give it much attention. As soon as I settle Dayita with a pacifier, I tear open the brown packet.
Inside is a velvet jewelry box, and a note in Gouri Ma’s handwriting. For our granddaughter. I sigh, half-amused, half-vexed at the waste of money. It’s probably a pair of silver bell-anklets like the ones people are always giving babies. Pretty, but most impractical. As soon as I put them on Dayita, she’ll start chewing them.
But when I open the box, I gasp. For inside on a cushion of pale cream silk sits a necklace with a beautiful ruby pendant, shining with a red light that seems to well up from deep within it. It takes me a moment to realize that it is the ruby, the one that enticed Anju’s father and mine away from their families—one to his death, the other to murder. The last time I looked at it, the ruby had filled me with foreboding, but now, tamed by the lacy gold frame that binds it, it is merely beautiful. Is it because it has exacted sufficient suffering from us? The ancestral house of the Chatterjees is indeed reduced to rubble, and of its two daughters, one is childless and the other without a husband. Only Dayita, the sapling growing from the ruins, is untouched and strong with her infant power.
I slip the necklace over her head without hesitation.
“It’s your inheritance, baby,” I tell her. “Perhaps you can cleanse it of the film that has gathered around it, the sorrow and cruelty and greed.”
The crimson sparkle of the stone catches her eye, and she gives a gurgly laugh and tugs at it. But in a moment she is distracted by something far more fascinating—her socks. I smile as I watch her trying to pull them off. There is something marvelous about the way a jewel which had driven men to acts of folly and desperation lies forgotten on my daughter’s innocent chest.
But look, here is another packet in the carry bag. It is actually an envelope, a fat one. When I see my name printed in blocky letters on it, a slow, swollen throbbing fills my head. It is the same writing that was on the envelope of money sent to me on the eve of my marriage. My father’s writing.
How did he manage to get this letter in here? Along with his murderous arts, had he learned wizardry as well? Or had he bribed someone in our household?
I want to throw the letter away unopened, but my curiosity is too great. So I give Dayita her bottle and rip open the envelope.
Dear daughter, the letter begins. A shiver goes up my spine as I read the words. My body clenches with an old anger. He has no right to call me that. But I go on.
Dear daughter,
By the time you read this, you will be gone, and I will never see you again, for surely I will not live until you return from America—if you do indeed return. Knowing this gives me the courage to write my story, and to beg your forgiveness.
Some of my tale you have heard from your Pishi, though I doubt that the man she painted for you was really me. Who can know a man who lives, as I did, in camouflage? Not even he himself knows who he is.
Let me begin with the part no one else knows: the day we found the ruby cave. The day I thought of, briefly, as the happiest in my life, until events proved it to be the most disastrous.
By this time there were only three of us left in our party, your uncle Bijoy, I, and the man whose great-grandfather had originally discovered the rubies. Haldar (that was the name he gave us), a tall, wiry man with piercing eyes, had let the bearers go the day before. We were very close to the cave, and he didn’t want them to come any further. He didn’t trust them, he said. Had I been listening more carefully, I might have wondered if perhaps he didn’t trust us too. But I was crazy for the rubies and paid attention to little else.
At dawn that day we rowed the dinghy-boat from our launch to the edge of a mangrove swamp and entered the forest, sinking into the marshy ground with each step, hacking at the vines that blocked our way. From time to time Haldar consulted his compass and a little notebook he carried. I managed a look at it once, but it must have been written in some sort of code, for I couldn’t understand anything. In an hour we were covered with mud, exhausted, and not a little jumpy—for a number of the vines had turned out to be laudoga snakes, those whiplash-thin green creatures whose bite is said to be so instantly poisonous that no one even feels it. There was no question of stopping for rest—we had to get back to our boat by nightfall when, Haldar said, the tigers came out.
After a while the ground firmed, and Haldar took out the blindfolds and tied them over our eyes. We protested, saying this would slow us down further, that we were so lost in this forest already that we couldn’t even have found our way back to our boat. But he insisted. That had been the deal, and if we didn’t honor it, he was ready to turn back right then. So, blindfolded, we stumbled behind him, holding the end of a rope he’d tied to his waist, cursing as we bumped into each other or tripped over roots. After a while we could tell, by the change in the air, which was cooler now but musty and damp, that we had entered a cave. The path narrowed to a tunnel through which we had to crawl on our hands and knees—all our fancy safari clothing was in tatters by now—and then suddenly Haldar stood up and gave a gasp. I straightened up too and tore off my blindfold and saw that we were in a huge limestone cavern—so huge that the top of it receded into blackness. Haldar shone his flashlight onto the cavern wall nearest us, and we could see the rubies, embedded chunks that gleamed a dark rust color, like dried blood, against the chalky white. “Ten minutes,” whispered Haldar. “One ruby only.” We got down to our task silently—somehow it didn’t seem right to speak in such an awe-inspiring place. As soon as Bijoy and I had chiseled out our rubies, Haldar replaced our blindfolds. We returned the same way we’d come, falling, bruising ourselves over and over, but this time I didn’t feel any of it. I was too busy dreaming of how the ruby would change my life. How with it I would finally make your mother smile.
That night we ate well—Haldar had set a trap for fish before we’d left, and he made a fine mustard curry out of his catch—and we talked gaily of what we’d do with our newfound fortunes. But when your uncle and I lay down in the cabin—Haldar preferred to sleep outside, in the open air—Bijoy said, “Gopal, we have to talk.”
I was so exhausted I could barely keep my eyes open. “Can’t it wait till tomorrow?” I asked him. “I haven’t felt this sleepy in my life.”
“I’m tired too,” he said, “but no. Who knows what tomorrow will bring, whether any of us will be alive to see it.” There was something in his voice, at once anguished and stern, that made me shiver. I rubbed
at my eyes and lit the kerosene lantern that we’d switched off. In its flickering light I could see the sadness on his face. With that my sleep fled, because I knew what he had discovered.
“You lied to us,” said Bijoy. “You’re not my cousin, are you?”
My mouth felt like a tinderbox, dry and flammable, which even a single word would set alight.
“I trusted you,” Bijoy said. The words went through me like a knife. All this time I hadn’t realized that I loved him more than I had ever loved any man. When he called me brother, a sweetness rose up in me. I couldn’t bear the thought of him never doing that again.
And so I told him what I’d sworn never to tell anyone—the truth about myself, though I was afraid that it might cause him to turn from me in disgust. The shameful truth of being a bastard in the house of my father, Bijoy’s uncle in Khulna. How he’d seduced my mother, a maidservant in his household, then sent her back to her family when she told him a baby was on the way. But her family wanted no part of the disgrace an unmarried mother would bring them. Poor as they were, they had their standing in their community. So my mother returned to Khulna, half-starved, bruised black from the beatings her brothers had given her.
Many women in her position would have despaired and thrown themselves into a well, but my mother was determined to live, and to make a life for me. She bribed the gateman of the big house with a pair of gold earnings the master had given her, the last thing of value she had left, and appeared in front of the master and his wife—who was also pregnant—as they sat at dinner. She threatened to kill herself if her position in the household wasn’t restored, and adequate provision made for her baby. Nor was she going to die silently and in secret. She’d set fire to herself in the marketplace and scream out the name of her betrayer with her last breath. And if the master hushed up the scandal with his money, she’d come back as a ghost and haunt his wife. Haunt her until she had a miscarriage, not just this time but every time she was pregnant. She swore this on the head of her unborn child.