They speak comfortably, familiarly, like they’re picking up the threads of a recent conversation.
“I won’t see you again for a long time,” says Sudha. “I won’t be allowed to leave the house much, now that I’m graduating. Mother’s going to start looking for matches for me.”
“So soon?” Ashok looks startled. “I didn’t think—”
“Before I get into more trouble, she says!”
How can she bear to joke about it?
“My father’s away on business, but I’ll speak to him as soon as he returns,” says Ashok, his voice determined. “My parents weren’t going to start on my wedding plans until I graduated from college, but once I explain to them, I’m sure they’ll understand.”
Is he serious? They must be saints, his parents. They’ll have to be, and magicians too, if they are to persuade Aunt N that their son—the black-hearted villain who stole her little girl’s heart—is a fit match for Sudha.
“Please hurry,” says Sudha. “I don’t know how long I can hold my mother off. But do you really think they’ll agree? They don’t know me—”
“They will, once I’ve told them—”
“I’m not sure you know me either.” But now she’s smiling.
He raises her hand to his cheek—here, right in the middle of Calcutta, with the whole world looking on. Is he immensely brave, or merely stupid? “There are ways and ways of knowing.” He’s smiling too.
Singhji clears his throat.
“I must go,” says Sudha.
“Wait, I didn’t know it was your graduation. What can I give you? Ah—” He twists at his finger and pulls off a ring. It flickers in his palm like an eye of fire.
Diamonds? From his simple clothes and the way he was at ease navigating the streets of Calcutta I’d assumed Ashok came from a middle-class family. He certainly didn’t act like the stuck-up rich boys I’d meet from time to time at birthdays or weddings. But later Sudha would tell me, to my surprise, that his father—a self-made man—owned one of the larger shipping companies in Calcutta.
“No, no,” says Sudha. “It looks terribly expensive.”
“It is,” he says, but without arrogance. “I wouldn’t want to give you something second-rate.” His matter-of-fact voice as he slips the ring onto my cousin’s finger makes me wonder exactly how wealthy his family is.
“But how’ll you explain it? How will I—?”
“My things are mine to do what I want with them. And as for you—it can be a secret, until.”
“Until!” Sudha repeats the word as though it were a spell.
Singhji starts the car. The lovers—yes, unwilling though I am, I must accept that that’s what they are—let go of each other’s hands with reluctance, fingers touching until the last moment. They don’t wave but watch with concentration until the car turns a corner. I sneak a look at my cousin. I’m afraid she might be crying, but she looks serene and confident as she touches her lips to the ring.
My poor Sudha. Does she really believe Aunt N will allow her to marry a boy from a lower caste, from a family that’s made its money in trade? Someone whom Sudha herself decided on, challenging Aunt’s authority?
Sunlight catches the ring as we come to a stop in front of the school, and the stones blaze up briefly. Sudha takes it off and slips it into her blouse. “Don’t look so worried, Anju!” she says. “I’ll give it to you to keep when we get home. That way even if Mother goes through my drawers like she does once in a while, she won’t find it. It’s only for a little time anyway, till I get married.”
Perhaps she’s right to hope. Perhaps love and longing can make a magic around them. Look how this morning’s meeting happened. Perhaps Ashok’s determination—if his parents are rich enough—will manage to sway Aunt N.
If not—but I can’t bear to think of what that might mean for Sudha. Not yet.
The storm starts late in the evening. After the ceremonies at school, the final assembly where Sister Baptista surprises us all by bursting into tears. After the dinner at home, which goes off wonderfully, without any of the hitches Aunt N gloomily predicted. All the guests arrive on time, laden with gifts and good wishes. They claim that the cauliflower korma is incomparable, and the rasogollahs are as soft as clouds. They admire us profusely when we walk in wearing the matching pink Benarasi saris that Mother has bought us for the occasion. Even the teatime aunties have only kind things to say. The mothers are exuberant, each in her own way. Pishi keeps wiping at her eyes, telling anyone who will listen that God is great, who would have thought that after the great tragedies they’d been through, the house of the Chatterjees had so much happiness in store. Aunt N proudly corners guests and shows off our certificates. I have a hard time keeping a straight face when I hear her proclaim, “Sudha’s so diligent, and Anju’s so smart. We couldn’t ask for better girls!”
My mother, though quietest, is the happiest of all, because she’s the one who struggled the most to keep the family afloat through the dark times. Is she remembering the many days when she left for the bookstore in the morning and returned late at night, dead-tired, only to have to listen to the slew of problems that had occurred at home during the day. She’s had to pay for our success with worry lines and graying hair and chronic heartburn and, more recently, a shortness of breath so severe that halfway up the stairs she has to stop and rest. But tonight she’s absolutely elegant in a cream tassar silk, a pearl brooch pinned to her shoulder. When she motions to me to come sit by her and lays her hand lightly on my head, I feel a tumult of love in my heart. I understand why Sudha sacrificed so much to make her mother happy. I’m willing to do the same, I tell myself, but luckily my mother won’t ask it of me.
The storm begins in earnest after the guests have left, when Sudha and I are in my room undressing. We switch off the light and open the big window because we both love storms—the dusty electric smell, the dark, spreading wings of clouds, the ecstatic drumbeat of rain. We’re too wound up to sleep, so we take a long time to fold our saris and comb out our hair, to wipe the bindis from our foreheads and clean the kajol from our eyes. Sudha slips Ashok’s ring onto her index finger and turns her hand so the diamonds glint suddenly in lightning, then disappear, then glint again before the next thunderclap.
“But how can you love someone so much when you’ve only spoken to him twice?” I ask. “How can you be ready to marry him?”
“It happens,” says Sudha dreamily. Dressed only in her petticoat, her open hair spilling like black water over her bare breasts, she goes to stand at the window. A pipal branch breaks off with a loud crash. Wind blows in a gust of rain, and when Sudha turns, I see the drops glittering in her hair like pearls. “I know why peacocks dance in rain, don’t you?” says my heartbreakingly beautiful cousin. Ashok, I think, if only you could see her like this! Then I’m jealously glad that he can’t.
“How, Sudha?” I persist. I’ve got to understand this dangerous current that’s sweeping her away from the safe shore where I’m left desolately alone.
“I can’t explain.” Sudha’s forehead creases in perplexity, and I see that love is almost as much a mystery to her as it is to me. Then her face lights up. “But I can tell you a story about it, and then maybe you’ll understand.”
“What kind of story?”
“The story about the princess in the palace of snakes.”
It’s a fairy tale that Pishi’s told us many times But Sudha has a way of retelling things, making them magical and novel. Maybe her voice and words, woven into this rainy night, will help me figure out this love that’s so different from what she and I have felt for each other all our lives.
“Once there was a princess,” begins Sudha, “who lived in an underwater palace filled with snakes. No one knows who her parents were, or how she came to be in this place.”
“Was she unhappy?” I ask. My task in these tellings is to be the questioner of statements, and the interpreter of answers.
“Happy enough,” says Sudha. “The
snakes were beautiful—green and yellow and gold—and gentle. They fed her and played with her and sang her to sleep. They wove themselves into her hair like garlands.”
“Didn’t she ever get tired of her palace? Didn’t she want to see the outside world?”
“No. Remember, she didn’t know there was more to life than that dim green underwater light, those cool palace walls built of coral and sea stone.”
“But then—”
“The prince came. He carried a jewel which made the lake waters part so he could reach the underwater palace. It was by chance, really. It wasn’t as if he was looking for a princess. She was sleeping when he arrived. When he woke her, she couldn’t believe her eyes. When he spoke, she knew she’d never be satisfied with the wordless songs of her serpent companions again.”
“And she fell in love, just like that?” I’m a little scornful.
“Just like that.”
“Why?”
“Because he was the one to wake her and tell her about the magical universe of men—diamond light on sleek mango leaves, the kokils crying to their mates from the coconut trees. He rescued her from sameness, from too much safety. There had been no mirrors in the palace. When she looked into his eyes, their dark center, she saw herself for the first time, tiny, and doubled, and beautiful. I think that’s why she loved him most. Without him she’d never have known who she was.” Sudha smiles a tender, inward-gazing smile, and for a moment it’s as if she’s forgotten the storm, the room, even me. Everyone except Ashok.
Thunder crashes outside again. It sounds like an entire tree has fallen. The impact shakes our room, and for the first time I feel a flash of fear. I want Sudha to continue the story—how the wicked king captures the princess and insists that she marry him. How after many trials the princess is reunited with her true love. But there’s a series of urgent thuds, like giant fists, just outside.
Then I realize that they are fists. Someone’s knocking on our door.
“Girls, what on earth were you doing? I’ve been knocking forever.” Pishi’s voice is testy. “Get dressed and come with me right away.” Her eyes are puffy from tears, her lips tight with worry. In the flickering, gritty light her white sari billows around her like the garment of a ghost. As we walk behind her down the dim corridor, she adds, so softly that we have to strain to hear, “Gouri’s very ill.”
OF ALL THE rooms in this mansion that is crumbling under the onslaught of age and ancient memories, I know Gouri Ma’s room the least. It has always been her haven, the one place where she could go to when she was tired of our squabbles, the other mothers’ heated arguments, the never-ending stream of bills. In a life lived largely for the sake of others, it was the one place that was her own. Late at night sometimes strains of sitar music would come to us from behind the closed door, or a faint scent of rose incense, so pure and sweet that I’d want to curl up inside it. But though Gouri Ma never said it, we all knew her room was out of bounds unless she invited us in. Even my mother respected that. So today as we crowd into it, I feel like an invader.
Everyone is here: my mother, Pishi, Ramur Ma, a couple of the older servant women who have been with the family from before our birth. Even Singhji, whom I have never seen inside the house, carries in a couple of medical bags behind a thin, intense-eyed man we don’t know. Old Dr. Ganguly, our regular physician, must have been unable to make it through the storm. The new doctor is already preparing an injection. There is a hospital smell in the air, disinfectant and fear, as he says, “Make space, please, the patient needs air,” but no one listens.
Gouri Ma lies on her side with her legs pulled up. Her breath comes noisily from someplace far inside her chest. Once in a while she grips the bedclothes with her fists as though to squeeze the pain out of herself. She keeps her eyes tightly closed. Worse than the pain is the helplessness she must feel as she lies here with all of us watching, my proud aunt who has always kept to herself her weaknesses, her desperations, the many nights of private pain that must have preceded this public one.
“Someone needs to move all these people out of here,” says the doctor irritably as he puts a stethoscope to Gouri Ma’s chest. I turn to Pishi for direction, but she clutches the bedpost, frozen, as though it were the mast of a foundering ship. Singhji is the one who guides us out, sending the servants downstairs and telling my weeping mother that Memsaab needs to pull herself together, for the sake of the girls if nothing else. In his scorched, ruined face, his deep-set eyes are stern with unexpected authority. Under their gaze, my mother’s wails gradually subside into sobs. He brings us chairs so we can wait in the corridor, shuts the passage window through which rain is sweeping in, wipes the floor with an old cloth he has procured from somewhere, and seats himself on the ground at a respectful distance in case the doctor needs him.
The night limps on. The grandfather clock downstairs chimes, and its hollow echoes fill my skull. There are flapping sounds at the window. A bird, seeking shelter. Or is it something else? I know the old stories: When someone is very ill, spirits who were close to her in life come down to earth to take her back with them. For Gouri Ma this would be her husband, my uncle Bijoy, that gentle, trusting man who came to a premature, watery end. Would his spirit look like his body had at death, bloated and trailing river weeds? Would it glare at me, accusal-eyed? I glance guiltily at Anju to see if she knows what I’m thinking. But her face is as wooden as the chair she is sitting on, her eyes like black holes gouged into her face. I am afraid to touch her, to pull her back into this fear-filled corridor from wherever it is that she has gone.
The flapping noises have grown deafening. I can’t stand them any longer, though no one else seems to hear them. Shivering, I stumble to the window, fling it open. Please, I whisper, though I among all of us here have the least right to ask. Please don’t take her yet. We need her so much. There’s an answering sound like a cry. A wet wind slaps at my face—or is it the ghost, displeased that the daughter of the man whose madcap scheme led them both to their deaths dares to speak to him? Is there a swamp smell, a phosphorescent streak in the outline of hands swirling away into the darkness?
Anju doesn’t notice—she’s still gone—but my mother says in annoyed tones, “Sudha, what’s wrong with you? Look what you’ve done. Now the passageway’s wet again. Close that window at once.”
Is it then, or hours later, that the door to Gouri Ma’s room creaks open? I hear the doctor’s low voice giving Pishi instructions. Diet, he says. Temperature. Tests starting tomorrow. Give her these tablets if there’s more pain. Call me if there are any sudden changes.
Pishi turns to Anju. “Your mother wants you.”
“Make sure you don’t excite her,” admonishes the doctor as he hands his bags to Singhji. “Her condition isn’t good at all. I’d rather she didn’t have any visitors at this time, but she insisted.”
Anju’s eyes reach for mine, entreating. I can feel her fear in the salt taste in my own mouth. But when I rise to follow her, Pishi stops me. “Alone, Gouri said.”
That’s how it is sometimes when we plunge into the depths of our lives. No one can accompany us, not even those who would give up their hearts for our happiness.
My cousin opens the door to her mother’s room. The odor of phenol and urine seeps into the corridor, the heartbreaking smells of the shamed, powerless body, and Anju walks in.
I lie awake in Anju’s high white bed, waiting for her. After the doctor left, Mother ordered me to my room, but I crept from it as soon as she fell asleep. I couldn’t bear the thought of Anju having to face the rest of the night alone.
I imagine the sickroom, the way the bedside lamp must have thrown a little light onto the mahogany fourposters so they glinted red-black, the pulse’s erratic beating in Gouri Ma’s throat as she lay propped against pillows. She would not have struggled to sit up. She would not have wept. An intelligent woman, she would have saved her energy for the important things. Her voice would have been soft as tearing silk.
&nb
sp; What words did my aunt use to admit failure and fear, to unravel the dreams she had woven around Anju since her birth? I don’t know. When Anju finally staggers in, and I ask if she’s all right, she gives in to laughter, a hysterical laugh that goes on and on, spiraling upward until, afraid that someone will come to check on what’s wrong, I put my hand over her mouth.
Anju is silent now. Only a small shudder shakes her from time to time. I make her lie down. She turns on her side to make space for me, and I lie down too, as we’ve done so many times. I cover us with the bedspread and stroke her hair until her limbs let go a little of their tenseness. Just before she falls asleep she gives a great sigh. “Remember how I used to laugh at Pishi’s sayings? Well, I’ve just learned not to.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, my throat tight with dread.
“Remember how she used to say, be careful of the words you speak for they might come true? Remember how I promised you, the night your mother decided to shut you up at home, that I’d make sure the same things would happen to us both? Well, they have.”
“What do you mean?” I repeat, stupidly. My cousin’s words make no sense to me.
“Don’t ask me any more tonight. I can’t talk about it.”
I hold my cousin as she sleeps and try vainly to decipher what she said. But I cannot imagine Gouri Ma, even in illness, speaking like my mother. Finally I give up. It is too late, and I am too tired. Or perhaps fear has short-circuited my brain. Anju’s head fits into the curve of my shoulder as though she were a child. Her eyes dart beneath their lids. I pray for her to have sweet dreams, Anju, whose waking life has fallen in shambles around us. The storm passes, the wind transforms itself into a morning breeze, the ghu-ghu birds begin their cooing. Slowly the sounds of the waking household surround us, strangely soothing. A sweeping broom, water being pumped from the tube-well, the clatter of milk cans. After a while, even though I hadn’t thought it possible, I too drift into sleep.