THE LOVE OF A GOOD MAN
WHEN I WAS growing up in Calcutta, my mother had a saying she was fond of: The love of a good man can save your life.
It’s not an exclusively Indian sentiment. Here in San Jose, California, too, I’ve heard women saying the same thing, even women I admire. But somehow, whenever I heard it, the voice would be overlaid with my mother’s cultured Bengali accent. And I would be back with her at one of the engagement ceremonies that occurred with daunting frequency in our large extended family, though now that Father was gone, we attended fewer of them. It embarrassed me terribly, the way she wiped delicately at her eyes with her white lace handkerchief before pronouncing the words. I was a teenager and easily embarrassed, and if there were people around whose opinion I valued—the glamorous cousins who lived on Hungerford or Park Street and wore European makeup, or school friends with older brothers who knew to whistle the latest Beatles tunes—my embarrassment turned to rage. How the hell would you know, I’d long to shout into her face, which was still beautiful in its resigned, aristocratic way, and curiously untouched.
No, I never gave in to that longing.
Where I grew up, you didn’t talk to your mother that way, not even when she’d lost what was most important in her life and thus ruined yours. And though my mother and I conversed about many things—my college professors, a new movie, the rising price of Ilish fish—we rarely spoke about what we really thought. We buried our hurts inside our bodies, like shrapnel. We’d been trained well by generations of grandmothers and widow-aunts whose silences weighed down the air of the crumbling ancestral home where we still lived, though now it was too large for the two of us.
There was another thing. I loved my mother, although I would never have admitted it then. Even as I promised myself I wouldn’t ever be like her, staking my happiness on a man’s whims, I held myself wire-taut to protect her from harm.
In believing I could do this, I was my mother’s daughter—sentimental, stubborn, foolish. Exactly how foolish my mother showed me by slipping from my grasp into death.
SHE DID THIS the way she did everything (everything unrelated to my father, that is)—gracefully, with the illusion of ease, like a swimmer entering a warm pool. As though it didn’t hurt at all.
FOR OVER A year after my mother’s death, I couldn’t stand to hear her name. Then one day I found myself thinking of her without the blood slamming around inside my skull. I was thinking of the saying she had liked so much, and how, ironically, her death had proved its corollary: the loss of love, even if it’s not a good man’s, can kill you. That was what it had done, the cancer which wove its insidious tendrils through her lungs, and which she had managed to keep secret from me almost until the end. The cancer that had begun, old Dr. Biswas told me unwillingly when I confronted him after her death, two years back.
Which was when my father had abandoned her—and me—for a new life in America.
MOTHER USED TO say, The stars are the eyes of the dead.
I think of this sometimes when, after tucking Bijoy into his crib, Dilip and I go out onto our night porch. We slump into the railing with the pleased exhaustion familiar to lovers and to parents of young children. Dilip’s arm is cool against mine, and smooth as eucalyptus wood. The sprinklers come on, we hear invisible arcs of spray rising and falling, moving in predetermined rhythms across the garden. His skin smells like the watered earth. If she were really looking down on us, my mother would be pleased to see that over the years I’ve come to accept much of what she tried to teach me. That saying, for example, about a good man’s love.
I guess I have to thank Dilip for that.
By the time I met him in graduate school, I had decided I was never going to get married. A good time, yes. Affairs, yes. I already had a few to my credit. But I would be the one in control, I warned the men I went out with, the one to say good-bye. When they asked why, I shrugged. Sometimes, the way one presses on a broken bone to check its healing, I told them briefly of my father’s departure. About my mother I did not speak. I watched that slight shift in their gaze which signaled pity—or a new and sudden desire, and smiled as a tourist might, just passing through.
But Dilip said, “Monisha, what your father did, why does it have to affect us?”
We were standing under the coppery brightness of a streetlamp outside my apartment building. I looked into his face, its perplexity, and felt that perhaps he was right. That perhaps happiness, which I’d given up on, was an uncharted possibility, a brave geography worth the long effort of exploration.
I DIDN’T ALWAYS disagree with Mother’s sayings. Here’s one I knew intuitively to be true long before my life proved it so: Out of bluest sky, lightning strikes.
So I’m not really surprised when one morning in our calm California kitchen, as I’m feeding Bijoy, Dilip puts his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and says, “It’s your father.”
What does surprise me is the hate, welling up from someplace in me I didn’t know was there. Since he left us, I had only heard from my father once, a letter, five years back, when I was about to get married. How he found the address of the apartment I shared with two other students I never did discover. I guess in America there are ways, if you have enough money. He wanted to attend my wedding. I wrote back a polite, definite no. The sophisticated tone of my refusal convinced me that I had overcome the rage of my adolescent years.
Now my hand shakes so hard that I have to put down the spoon.
“Monisha,” Dilip says. “He wants to visit his grandson. For his first birthday.”
“No,” I say, and I pull Bijoy’s cereal-sticky hands over my ears so I will not have to hear any more.
But of course I hear. I hear Dilip, courteous as always, say, “I’ll have to get back to you, sir.” Hear him coming across the kitchen floor toward me.
“No. No. No,” I shout.
“It’s okay, Mona,” Dilip says. “Shhh, it’s okay.” He puts his hands on mine.
I sit there in my kitchen, streaks of cereal drying on my cheek, holding on to my husband’s hands as if he could save me. And I cry as I haven’t cried since that day at Nimtola crematorium when I watched mother’s body burn.
But I’m not crying for her. I’m crying because all this time I believed I had cured myself of shame—only to have my father show me, with a single phone call, that it wasn’t so.
* * *
IT IS MY favorite time, just after lovemaking, when darkness petals around our bed, holding us in its center. Our moist breaths are mingled; our damp limbs have fallen where they will, unselfconscious, as though we are one body.
Then Dilip says, “He’s an old man.”
There’s a taste in my mouth like rust and illness.
I make myself run my fingertips in little circles over his chest. Perhaps if I act as though I didn’t hear, the moment can be salvaged, a little.
But Dilip says, “Mona, listen to me. Bijoy is his only grandchild. He wants to see him before he dies. Surely you can understand that.”
I jerk my hand away and pull up the bedsheet to cover me.
“I know you blame him for the hardships you had to go through after he left. And you have the right to—”
You bet I do, I want to shout. The sheet is thick and inescapable, a casing of ice. You bet I do. The bastard killed my mother. It’s something I’ve never said aloud, not to myself, and certainly not to Dilip, who knows nothing of my mother except that she is dead.
“But can’t you put it behind you?” Dilip is saying.
Easy for you to say, I think as I stare at my husband, his face so earnest and wholesome that it’s clear nothing has ever happened in his life to make him understand what shame is. But perhaps it is only a woman who can realize that word truly.
Suddenly I want to hurt Dilip. I want him to know this gritty tightness in the lungs, like inhaled ash.
“After all, that was a long time ago, in another country—”
The tightness explodes, sp
raying the air with cinders. It takes me a moment to figure out that it’s me, laughing.
“Mona, Mona,” Dilip is trying to put his arms around me. “Calm down, please.”
“ ‘And, besides,’ ” I gasp as I push him from me, “ ‘the wench is dead.’ ”
My scientist husband looks at me, bewildered.
“Shakespeare,” I say. “As You Like It. Put it on your reading list.”
Then I snatch up the pillow and go into the guest room.
HERE’S ANOTHER SAYING: Anger is the great destroyer. In that last year when she knew she was dying, and I didn’t, Mother had cause to say it to me often. I think she got it out of some holy text. They were the only books she read anymore.
She may have been right about anger. I don’t deny it. Any more than I deny that I’d become excruciating to live with since Father left. I was like the mansha cactus that grows in the crannies of ruined buildings. Only, my thorns pointed inward, a constant stinging. I lashed out at people every chance I got. It was the only way I knew of consuming pain.
Anger is the great destroyer. Maybe. But I thought of it as my savior.
If Mother had had more anger in her, a voice that beat inside her bones on sleepless nights, Son of a pig, I refuse to let you ruin my life, perhaps she would still be alive.
After Mother died, anger was the drug that dulled the throbbing in my head long enough for me to tell solicitous relatives that, no, I wasn’t going to move in with any of them, and, no, I didn’t really care what people thought of an unmarried girl living alone. It steadied my hand when later I wrote in university applications that I had no relatives in America and was therefore eligible for a student visa. It disconnected me from the need to weep when I sold my mother’s jewelry and all her silk saris except one for ticket money.
THE SARI I didn’t sell was frayed and ivoried, with a traditional red border. Mother wore it every morning to say her prayers. When I was little I sat by her and played with its crinkly fabric while she rang the brass bell shaped like Hanuman the monkey god. Sometimes I pressed my face into its odors: sandalwood incense and the pungent marigolds Mother offered to the gods in hope of happiness.
WHEN I CHOSE anger, did I have to pay a price?
I’ll reply with another question: Don’t we all have to pay, no matter what we choose?
OVER DINNER DILIP says, “I have to call him back soon.”
I push back my half-eaten dinner and pick up my glass. “Once I met a man. I thought he was smart and sensitive. Caring. That was why I married him—”
“Please, Mona. Don’t go all clever and sarcastic on me. Consider carefully. You may regret it one day.”
“I thought we’d finished discussing this.” My face feels stiff, like it’s sprayed with starch. One more word might make it crack.
“How about Bijoy? Doesn’t he deserve something, a photo to remember his grandfather by. . . .”
Until I feel the pain in my hand I don’t realize how hard I’ve set the glass down. The shards make jagged patterns on the table. The spilled water soaks through my skirt, surprisingly cold. There’s a small gash on my palm from which an inordinate amount of blood wells. Dilip reaches out in dismay. He’s saying something. But I hear my mother: Bad luck follows glass breaking.
My mother had been meticulous in her housekeeping. All the glasses in our house shone, even the ones we never used, like the lead crystal set Father brought back from a long-ago business trip to Europe. Once a month she would take them out and wash them in soda water. She’d use an old pink toothbrush to scrub out the grime that accumulates on everything in Calcutta, working lovingly around the ridges and grooves. When I watched her turning a glass around in her elegant, capable hands, I knew she would keep it safe, protected forever from falling. Like she kept me.
“Don’t talk to me about remembering,” I say.
DILIP SWEEPS AWAY the glass pieces and bandages my hand. He gives Bijoy his night bottle. He says, Listen, I’m really sorry, I won’t bring it up again. Says, Come to bed, Mona, at least try to sleep. Says, Talk to me, please, how can I understand if you don’t talk to me?
This is what I don’t tell him:
When she realized Father wasn’t coming back, my mother went to the china cabinet. She took out a crystal glass, weighed it thoughtfully in her palm. Behind her I held my breath, fearing and wanting it at once, the crash, the pieces exploding into a violent diamond light. But after some time she called the maid and told her to wrap the set carefully and put it in a box. Tomorrow she would send it to the Loreto orphanage, where the nuns held a yearly auction.
“Make sure you don’t use newspaper,” said my mother. “The print will leave stains.”
I STAND UNOBSERVED in the corridor, watching Dilip and Bijoy play crocodile.
This is how they do it: Dilip lies facedown on the carpet while Bijoy crawl-climbs onto his back. Then Dilip gives a shake and Bijoy rolls off, shrieking with laughter, and an enormous, goofy grin appears on Dilip’s face. They’ve done it about twenty times already and show no signs of tiring.
Watching, I think I understand why my easygoing husband has been so insistent about my father coming to visit. It has less to do with my father than with the idea of fatherhood, what it means to him.
When there’s a moment of quiet I say, “He can come the week after Bijoy’s birthday. He can stay one night.”
Dilip half-rises, a startled movement. Bijoy loses his balance, bumps his head, and begins to cry. I pick him up and kiss him.
“Are you sure?” asks Dilip. “Maybe it’s best not to—”
“Dinner’s ready,” I interrupt. To Bijoy, who’s still sobbing, I give another kiss. “Everyone falls,” I tell him. “Everyone gets hurt. That’s the way it is.”
WHY DID I change my mind?
I could say I did it for Dilip, but I suspect there is more to it. Did watching my husband and son at play remind me of a time when my father and I, too, had done the same? When he had carried me on his back around a veranda, shaking his head, making improbable horse noises? Had swung me around in the cool brightness of a garden while greens and yellows blurred into a stream of gold?
No. I have no early memories of my father at all. Whether this is because he was never around, or because I have, with a certain subconscious severity, wiped him from my mind, I am not sure.
But perhaps my first mistake lies in trying to find motive, in thinking of humans as rational beings whose actions spring from logical causes.
For years I tortured myself by trying to uncover the reason beneath my father’s leaving. He had grown tired of the trapped sameness of days in a house built by his great-grandfather, I told myself. He had been lured to America by visions of gleaming glass and steel. He had discovered that he no longer loved his wife—that he had never loved her. Or his daughter.
Now I think it might have been more simple than that. (But maybe it is a different word I am reaching for—random, or mysterious.) Could be, if I had asked him, my father wouldn’t have been able to give me an answer, even if he wanted to. Just as I cannot say why I am going against every instinct to let him back into my life.
I HAVE DECIDED I will not go to any trouble to prepare for my father’s visit. I want him to know that I don’t care about impressing him. So when the doorbell rings that afternoon, my living room is in disarray, the carpet littered with baby books and teething rings, the window-glass sticky with small handprints just where the light hits it most.
Too late I see that I’ve done it all wrong. I should have covered the table in designer batiks. I should have dressed Bijoy in his embroidered birthday kurta. I should have put on my reddest lipstick and my highest heels, forcing my father to look up, amazed and vexed by the daughter who made a success of her life in spite of him.
But already Dilip’s key is rattling in the lock. Breathless, I reach for Bijoy. My talisman. But even as I think the words a terrible objectivity descends on me. For the first time I see my son as a stranger might:
a thin, dark-skinned child, quite unremarkable, with a smudge of lunchtime ketchup on his chin.
Distressed, I kiss Bijoy over and over. You’re the best boy in the world, I whisper in fierce apology. But a faint bitterness, like seawater, will not leave my mouth.
Perhaps all parents go through this betrayal of vision. But for mine I blame my father.
LATER I WILL try to remember how it felt, the moment when the door swung open, invading the room with the smell of jasmine, facing me with my father.
A note on jasmine: In Bengal, it is considered an erotic flower, a favorite at weddings. Summer evenings, after the day’s unbreathable heat, women sit on cool, washed terraces and braid it into their hair. Mother used to do that sometimes, though not after Father left, when there was no longer a reason for her to be beautiful.
Early in her marriage, Mother had had jasmines planted all through our garden. Even that last year, when the rest of the yard was choked by weeds, she’d go downstairs to pick the wilted flowers off the vines.
When she died, I ordered enough jasmine garlands to cover the entire funeral bed. Shocked relatives whispered their disapproval of such an inappropriate gesture—and so extravagant, too, from a girl who didn’t even have a dowry.
WHEN WE WERE looking to buy this house, I told Dilip that the jasmine vines that covered the porch would have to go.