Anju. I must get to Anju.
But against my will my feet walk me to my mother’s door. I stand there, shadow among shadows, and watch her. She holds on hard to the window bars, her body taut, her forehead pressed against the rusting iron. She is weeping, but not in her usual way—woeful theatrical sobs, loud entreaties called out to all the deities. She cries soundlessly, my mother, with only the trembling line of her back to tell me what is going on. Then she raises her face and looks at the moon.
And suddenly an old nursery rhyme comes to me. Chander Pane cheye cheye raat keteche kato. I’d forgotten that she used to sing it when I was small, while she rocked my cradle, while she smiled down at me.
I have spent so many nights gazing at the moon.
That must be why you came to me, my moon-faced child.
Let us go into the forest, the two of us, you and I,
so I can sit silent and enjoy your beauty.
To my mother, her life must have seemed like a trick of the moonlight. One moment her arms were filled with silvery promises. The next she was widowed and penniless. Alone in a world of glowering clouds, except for a daughter. Each hour the clouds crept closer, pressed another wrinkle onto her face. Words were all she had to save herself and her child. She picked the cleverest ones and wove them into a careful garland around her throat. Through them, for a while, she could be what she had so achingly wanted, on that faraway morning by the river.
But lately she had felt their fragrance wearing off, their petals drooping. A single strong gust of wind could blow them into nothingness, leaving her cruelly exposed. And now even her daughter, the one person, surely, that a mother should be able to depend on—the one person she had done it all for—was spreading her wings, called away by other songs.
“Sudha,” whispers my mother against the bars. “Sudha, Sudha, Sudha.” She rubs a hand across her forehead as though it hurts. What word had the Bidhata Purush written on it for her to be seduced so easily by the dream of love? What other word had he written to make her so determined to save me from the same fate? Does she believe—as perhaps all mothers do—that through her daughter she can redeem her life?
Outside, the pipal trees rustle, though there is no wind. They whisper my name in the same longing tones, as though they are familiar with her sorrow, her fear of being abandoned again.
A bird may escape a cage built of hate, of the desire for power. But a cage built of need? Of love’s darkness?
I do not go to the cool sarai of water that waits in the hallway. I do not go to Anju, her sweet arms, the solace of our shared rage and rebellion. I walk back to my room, to the burning bedsheet that twists around me like an umbilical cord. All night I lie awake, thinking of many things.
When the first crows announce morning, with their harsh, startled-sounding cries, I know I will not fight my mother’s will.
Not, at least, in this.
I’M FURIOUS with Sudha.
“You can’t just let your mother have her way, not in this,” I shout as I pace up and down her bedroom. “Without a college education, what kind of life are you going to have? You might as well tie a bucket around your neck and jump in a well right now. You might as well put blinkers over your eyes and join the bullocks that go round and round the mustard mill. That’s all you’re going to be, a beast of burden for some man.”
“Anju, please, sit down,” says Sudha. “You’re making me dizzy.” When I sit grudgingly on her bed, she smiles a small, strained smile. She hasn’t slept all night—I can tell by the bags under her eyes. Sudha could never handle lack of sleep. Next thing I know, she’ll be falling sick.
“But we agreed last night,” I fume, punching at the ugly brown bedspread, chosen—of course—by Aunt N. “We were going to fight it together. I’ve even made a list of the arguments we’d use to get Mother on our side. How can you change your mind so fast? How can you be such a coward?”
Sudha looks at me, her beautiful eyes distressed. And right away I know it’s not fear that’s making her do this.
“Did Aunt say something to you last night?” I ask suspiciously.
Sudha shakes her head. “I don’t want to break my mother’s heart, that’s all.”
“Your mother doesn’t have a heart, let alone one you can break.”
“Anju!” Sudha says reproachfully. “Every person has a heart, but we’re not always lucky enough to get a glimpse of it. And every heart, even the hardest, has a fragile spot. If you hit it there, it shatters. I’m all my mother has. I just don’t want her to feel that I too have turned against her.”
“Fine. So you’re going to ruin your life for her? After all the plans we’d made about reading Shakespeare and Tagore together, and learning about the rise and fall of civilizations, and studying the great inventions of modern science—”
“I’ll still be learning important, useful things, Anju.”
“Right, like how to make pantua and lemon pickle.”
“I’ll learn a lot more than that. And anyway, you love lemon pickle!”
“Don’t joke about it. You’ll be wasting all your talents—”
Sudha leans toward me so I can smell the clean neem fragrance of her soap. “Anju dear, don’t be so angry. I’m not giving that much up. Really. I thought about it all last night and realized college doesn’t matter to me like it does to you. For me, there are other things that are more important.”
When I look unconvinced, she says, “Look, I’ll prove it. Tell me, what do you want to do when you grow up?”
She uses the old phrase out of our childhood, although surely at almost-seventeen we’re quite grown up already. But I know what she means. Our life after we marry. Only neither of us is ready to name that exhilarating and terrifying condition—wifehood—yet.
“I want to run the bookstore,” I say. I close my eyes as I speak and smell the place, the mysterious dusty fragrance of cardboard and old paper, the chemical scent of new-printed ink that’s been in my blood almost since birth. “It’ll be hard to persuade Mother, but I’m sure I can. After all I’m her only child, with no competing brothers. That’s why I’m planning to study literature in college—so I can keep up with the latest writers and stock the best books.”
“What I want most,” says Sudha, “is to have a happy family. Don’t you remember the pictures?”
And suddenly I do. As children each week we’d draw pictures of our future life. Mine were different every time—a jungle explorer swinging from vines, a pilot in goggles flying a snub-nosed plane, a scientist pouring smoking liquids from one test tube to another. But Sudha’s were always the same. They showed a stick-figure woman in a traditional red-bordered sari with a big bunch of keys tied to her anchal. She wore a red marriage bindi in the center of her forehead and stood next to a mustachioed man carrying a briefcase. Around them were gathered several stick-figure children, their sex indicated by boxy shorts or triangular skirts. I’d secretly thought it all terribly boring.
“Yes, yes,” I say now, a little impatiently. “I want a happy family too. But surely there’s something else you want to do—for yourself.”
Sudha hesitates. A dreamy shyness comes into her eyes. I sigh, because I know she’s going to say she wants to marry Ashok. It strikes me that perhaps he’s the reason she gave in so easily—to pacify Aunt N while she gathered her forces for what’s bound to be the biggest battle of them all.
Then my cousin surprises me all over again.
“I want to design clothes,” she says. “Salwaar kameezes. Pleated wedding ghagras with mirrors stitched in. Kurtas for men, embroidered white on white silk. Baby frocks in satin and eyelet lace. I want to have my own company, with my own tailors and my own label, so that customers at all the best stores will ask for the Basudha brand. People in Bombay and Delhi and Madras will clamor for my work.”
I look at her face, gone all intense and shiny, and don’t know what to say. I’d no idea she felt like this. She’s never spoken of it—and with good reason. I ca
n just hear Aunt N shrilling, “A Tailor! You want to be a Common Tailor and rub kali on your ancestors’ faces!”
Just the thought of it makes me mad. Why shouldn’t Sudha do what makes her happy? Why shouldn’t she at least dream about it? So I complete her dream for her. “And one day you’ll be selling to the movies. Stars like Rakhee and Amitabh will refuse to dress in anything but your designs!”
Sudha’s eyes gleam like the mirrors she wants to stitch into her clothes. “Don’t forget the diplomats. They’ll be wearing my kurtas and Nehru coats and embroidered saris to England and Africa and Japan.”
“And America, don’t forget America!”
“And America, of course!” Both of us are laughing wildly now, our current problems forgotten as we swing suspended in that delicious space between belief and disbelief.
If there is a mocking, answering laugh from the honeysuckle-weighted cornices, the Bidhata Purush’s attendants eavesdropping, or maybe the demons, we don’t hear it.
AND SO the year passes. Sometimes the days are glassy and unmoving, as though I am suspended in a coma, waiting for my real life to resume. Sometimes they jerk ahead, halting and sputtering, reminding me that my brief freedom is about to end. Soon my world will be enclosed by these walls, these pipal trees. While Anju—how far she’ll go, leaving me behind. How dull I’ll seem to her when she returns from each day outside, bright as a sunflower that’s been drinking light. When the time comes for me to break out of my prison, will I have the strength? Or will I be like a too-tame house bird who prefers her cage to the vast frightening blue of the sky?
When I think this, I’m filled with heaviness. Did I give in too hastily? The lavish kindness my mother has started showering on me since I bowed to her decree is no comfort. They stifle me, all those evenings she spends teaching me to tie my hair in the newest styles, shaping my eyebrows into perfect arches, taking me to afternoon tea at the homes of her friends so I’ll know how to conduct myself in company. She has me listen in on their conversations, because she says that will teach me the ways of the world. But I am sickened by their always-same stories about the infidelities of husbands and the tricks wives must employ to hold on to them. Thank God Ashok is not like that, I think as I affix an engrossed expression on my face.
Although I haven’t spoken to Ashok since our meeting at the movie house, I have seen him. The first time was on our way back from school. Singhji was driving while Ramur Ma sat next to him, ramrod straight with renewed importance. In the backseat we talked desultorily—we knew whatever we said would make its way to my mother. It was one of those heat-warped days when everything wavers in the airlessness—pavements, buses, even the face of the traffic policeman who raised his hand, bringing our car to a halt just before we turned into our street. So that when Ashok appeared not far from our car window, dressed in the same white shirt I’d last seen him in, I thought he was only a figment of my wishing. Still, I froze mid-sentence, and Anju, when she turned to see what I was staring at, froze as well. But she’s quick, my cousin, and in a moment she was talking faster, telling a made-up story about a scandal at school, a girl caught cheating during an exam, and how the nuns sent for her parents and told them they must take her away for good the very same day. Ramur Ma was listening avidly, her mouth fallen open, so I was able to turn to the window and give Ashok a smile. He smiled back. I noticed that one of his front teeth was slightly crooked, and at that an illogical rush of love filled me. Now he was taking an envelope from his pocket. A letter! I wanted it more than I had wanted anything in my life. But I closed my eyes to signal no. I think he understood how I felt, for as the traffic policeman blew his whistle and our car moved forward, he touched the letter to his heart. I put my own hand on my heart, and felt it hammer under my palm in exhilaration and frustration and fear, and then—shocked at my own forwardness—I raised my fingers to my lips. The car speeded up—had Singhji noticed? In the rearview mirror Ashok’s shirt gleamed like a small white flame until it disappeared. There was an aching behind my eyes, tears I must not shed. I slipped my hand into Anju’s, and though she must have been annoyed at the risk I had just taken, she held it all the way home.
I saw Ashok a few times after that, each time at a different spot along our route to school. He would be drinking coconut water from a streetside vendor, or getting his chappal repaired at a muchi’s stand, or standing in line for a bus, his bookbag slung over his shoulder. But I knew he was really waiting for me. There was never any opportunity for talk. Our eyes would meet for an instant, a kind of electricity would shiver up my spine, then Singhji would honk his horn at a rickshaw-puller or weave past a fruit seller who was crossing the road at the wrong place, and we would be gone.
So little. And yet, for my starved heart, so much.
Anju and I never spoke of these moments. She too must have seen Ashok. Even if she didn’t, she would have known by my distracted air, the way she had to repeat a question—sometimes two or three times—before I answered. Perhaps she didn’t want to give these flash encounters further solidity by acknowledging them. Perhaps she believed that if she ignored them they would dissipate into the fume-filled Calcutta air until eventually I remembered them only as one remembers a beautiful dream, with wonder and resignation and a mild, painless regret for what could never be.
FINALLY IT’S HERE, in a flurry of mango leaves and hot April dust. The day of our graduation. I run up to the terrace as soon as I wake. The sky’s a brilliant cloudless blue, emptied by some magic of Calcutta smog. I throw out my arms and whirl around, singing “Freedom, freedom, freedom!” Generally, I wouldn’t behave in this childish way, but today I can’t help it. It finally seems real that in less than three months—as soon as summer vacation is over—I’ll start in the English honors program at Lady Brabourne College. One of our older cousins who studied there has told me we’ll begin by studying the ancient epic Beowulf. I’ve already borrowed it from the library and read it. Sometimes I whisper the names to myself—Grendel, Hrothgar, the brave and beautiful queen Wealtheow in the mead hall, and the little hairs on my arm stand up for joy.
When I stop, breathless and sweaty, I hear someone clapping. It’s a desolate, out-of-rhythm sound. I spin around and see Sudha, sitting in the shadow of the water tank—she must’ve come up here even earlier. There’s a funny look on her face. But of course. For her today’s the exact opposite of what it is to me. Each hour that passes will be another nail pounding shut the door of her prison.
As the hot terrace bricks burn into my soles, I make myself a promise. From now on, I’ll be Sudha’s eyes and ears. I’ll teach her everything I learn. The world Aunt N’s depriving her of—I’ll bring it to her.
But I don’t have a chance to tell her any of this because Pishi calls us down for our baths. There’s going to be a special puja done for us to please the nine planets so they’ll bless us with success and pleasant surprises.
Ramur Ma isn’t in the car with us today as we drive to school because the mothers need her help with the dinner they’re giving to celebrate our graduation. Just a few close family friends—but as with everything in our house, it’s got to be done right. Such elaborate preparations usually make me impatient, but this time I must confess I’m excited. The gilt-edged invitations were sent weeks ago, and the gilt-edged responses have been carefully counted. The formal hall has been dusted and aired and new candles put into the chandelier. Aunt N’s had the heavy silver dishes from great-grandfather’s time polished. Pishi’s arranged bouquets of kena flowers in huge brass vases by the front entrance. An hour before guests arrive, Ramur Ma will sprinkle sandalwood powder on a lighted brazier and walk through the house so every room is filled with fragrance. My mother has to handle the hardest task of all: buying a gift for each guest, something small (that’s all our family budget allows) yet elegant—for that’s how the Chatterjees always thank visitors for their good wishes.
Not having Ramur Ma’s watchdog presence in the car makes me giddily festive. “Let
’s make a list of all the great things about leaving school,” I say to Sudha.
“Okay. You start.”
“We won’t have to put up with Sister Baptista anymore, the way she says, ‘Ladies, Ladies, this is most inappropriate,’ whenever we express an opinion that’s different from hers. Your turn now.”
But Sudha’s staring ahead, her hands gripping the back of Singhji’s seat.
There he is, in another of his infernal white shirts, standing by a bookstall, his eyes searching the road.
Why does this have to happen today of all days?
Before I can prevent her, Sudha leans forward and says, “Singhji, please, stop at the curb.”
I’m not sure what Singhji will do, whether he’ll listen to the pleading in her voice or turn the car and take us straight back to the mothers. This isn’t the same as when she used to give away her lunch sweets to street children. He could lose his job for this.
Singhji doesn’t say yes or no. I try to figure out what he’s thinking, but that bearded, scarred face is like a shuttered house. After a moment I look away. There’s a certain dignity about him which makes me feel it’s vulgar to stare.
We’ve almost passed Ashok—Sudha bites her lip, but she too has her dignity and won’t ask again—when Singhji pulls over to the curb with a quick turn of the wheel. “Be quick, Missybaba,” he says. He doesn’t smile, but his eyes meet ours in the mirror for a breath-space. How is it that in all these years I didn’t notice how kind they are?
Sudha’s already at the open window, her hands extended, and Ashok hurries over to take them. I’m amazed at how swiftly this happens, how neither of them hesitates the least bit. It’s as if they’ve known each other for years. They remind me of the stories Pishi told us about the great lovers of the myths, Shakuntala and Dushmanta, Nala and Damayanti, Radha and Krishna, how they’d appear to each other in dreams and share their deepest secrets. It’s impossible, of course. And yet when I look at Ashok’s face and Sudha’s, they seem changed. Ashok’s face is older and thinner, as though something boyish has been burned away from it by his longing. And Sudha—I almost don’t recognize my cousin in this radiant woman. She’s so calm, it’s as if she’s been ready for this meeting a long time. It’s as if she knew it would happen.