“I’ll pick the perfect honeymoon spot. You’ll love it, Cara. And you’ll love tonight—our own little after-party.”
His lips are hot on my bare shoulder. He presses into me. I’m suddenly afraid of what tonight might hold.
In the darkness someone clears her throat loudly, announcing her presence. Startled and embarrassed, I try to pull away, but Rajat holds me to his side.
It’s Maman, just as I’d feared. Even in the half dark, I can see how rigidly she holds her body. I can’t blame her for being angry. But when she calls Rajat’s name, her voice is weighted down with some larger problem.
“What is it, Maman?”
She tells us. Her words slash to pieces the world I’ve known.
Rajat clenches his teeth as the Mercedes hurtles down the night streets toward the hospital, bucking and rattling across potholes because he has impressed upon Asif that speed is more important than comfort or even the welfare of the car. Bands of light from the street shiver over them, followed by striations of darkness. Glistening with tears, Cara’s face materializes in the corner, then disappears, then materializes again in a beautiful, hypnotic pattern. “Why is there so much traffic this late at night?” she says, clenching her fists, when they are forced to slow down behind a truck loaded high with bales of cotton. But Rajat guesses that she’s really asking another question, Why should this terrible thing happen to us? He doesn’t know how to answer it because it is his question, too. Why should this happen to us today of all days? Her distress fills the car. When he glances at her, his chest feels as if someone were squeezing it in an iron fist. For the first time in his life, he’s learning one of love’s tragedies: no matter how much you want to suffer in your loved one’s stead, you cannot take away her pain.
Earlier, when he helped her into the car, Cara said, “It’s my fault. I fought with him and brought this on.” He told her it wasn’t true, she wasn’t thinking straight; but he was shaken by the conviction in her voice. He tried to put his arm around her to comfort her—then, and later again. On each occasion she moved it politely away. It was the politeness that defeated him. Had she pushed his hand off, had she screamed at him to leave her alone as Sonia would have done, he would have been able to gather her to his chest and hush her.
He tries to imagine Bimal Roy lying in the hospital close to death; he tries to summon up concern for his helpless, furious pain. He knows how terrified Sarojini must be, handling the crisis all by herself. Rajat has always respected the stubborn old man for his crusty intelligence. He holds Sarojini in genuine affection. But today he can’t seem to feel anything except a baffled anger against the universe that it would ruin the happiest occasion of his life like this—and that, too, after he’d prayed in the temple, asking for forgiveness and promising to be true to Cara.
The car jerks to a stop at an intersection. The sudden movement makes Rajat dizzy. He hasn’t eaten properly all day. At the engagement lunch he had pushed the food around his plate, though usually he loves the traditional dishes that Cook prepares. Since morning, Sonia had left five messages on his mobile; anger at this invasion had curdled his stomach. That woman, why couldn’t she take no for an answer? In her last message, she said, “You’re rushing into a mistake you’ll regret all your life.” Now random thoughts assail him. The memory of other things she had said to him in that husky voice, how much he’d loved it once. And was it a bad omen, this heart attack occurring in the middle of the engagement party? Oh, he’s being as superstitious as a peasant! He shouldn’t have had so many drinks. But it had shocked him to see Sonia at the engagement party, that she’d managed to get in.
The car jolts to a standstill again. A group of partygoers, young men in narrow pants and shiny nylon shirts, has wandered into the middle of the street, making Asif miss his green light. Cara makes a panicked sound in her throat that leaves Rajat feeling helpless.
“Come on, Asif!” he exclaims in annoyance. “Can’t you do better than this?”
The news of the heart attack must have shaken up Asif, too. Uncharacteristically, he rolls down the window to shout at the young men. They shout back expletives. One of them thumps the hood. Another one grinds out his cigarette on it. For a moment Rajat is afraid that they’ll be embroiled in a fight.
That would not be good. In Communist-run Kolkata, the pedestrian is king. Public sentiment against cars—especially expensive foreign ones—runs high. If there’s a fight, onlookers would automatically take the side of the partygoers. Just a month ago an acquaintance of Rajat’s had been in an incident. His car had stopped at a busy intersection when a woman walked too close to it. Her dupatta got caught on the side mirror, and when the car moved forward, the dupatta slid off the woman’s shoulder. She accused him of harassing her; a crowd gathered immediately; they pulled him out of the car and, chivalrously, beat him up.
But today they’re in luck. The partygoers are distracted by friends yelling from the opposite pavement for them to hurry. With a last belligerent thump, they move on.
Relief mingled with anger makes Rajat’s voice sharper than usual. “That was a stupid thing to do!”
“Sorry, Saab.”
In the rearview mirror, Asif flashes Rajat an accusing glance. Rajat knows Asif blames him for forcing him to rush, for the ignominy of rabble handprints on the Mercedes, for the cigarette that might as well have been ground out on Asif’s skin. Why does he care so much? It’s not as though it were his car.
At the other end of the seat, Rajat’s fiancée is sitting straight, not crying anymore though her face is still wet. She wouldn’t let him wipe it for her or even take the handkerchief he offered. Rajat wants to conjure up the tenderness he feels for her and her alone, the tenderness that is the best part of who he is. But in the colored neon lights from an electronic billboard, she is no longer his Cara. She has gone back to being Korobi, the enigmatic stranger he saw across the room at a party. Is Sonia right, has he made a mistake, rushing to tie his life to this girl? He tries to push the insidious thought away, but it circles back. It frightens him so that he has to open the window and gulp in the smell of the city, flowers and fried pavement-foods and exhaust fumes from buses with people hanging from them even at this hour. Rancid and jubilant, the city comforts him. Tomorrow, things will look better. Tomorrow, the choices he has made will make more sense.
In the hushed ICU corridor, the lights are dim and splotchy. They must slip blue plastic covers over their shoes, spray disinfectant on their hands. The smell makes Rajat gag. Cracks in the plaster, like veins in a drunkard’s eye. He tries to keep his attention on Cara’s back as she hurries down the corridor, but his disobedient mind flits to the huge sum of money his mother had poured into making the evening perfect for them. Money he hadn’t wanted her to spend, money they couldn’t afford right now. But he always found it hard to talk to Maman about money trouble. It was the thing she was prickliest about. In all this rushing, he didn’t have a chance to tell Pia where he was going. He remembers the toast she had practiced so carefully, and a sadness overtakes him, the sadness of aborted things. He sees the old man’s face, crumpled around his oxygen mask. Tubes hang from his flaccid arms. How spiritedly he had argued with Papa only a few hours ago! They would all come to this, even Korobi in her agitated beauty, leaning over his bed.
Before entering the room, she asked Rajat if she could wear his jacket over her kurti.
“I should never have bought it. That’s what made him so upset. And now he’s in the hospital.”
“It isn’t your fault!” he protested again as he draped the jacket over her shoulders, but she only threw him an agonized look and retreated into that inner territory that baffled him. With Sonia there had never been this distance. With her, the lack of distance had exhausted him.
Rajat seats himself on the wooden bench beside Sarojini. Bowed into a comma, she suddenly looks frighteningly old. She rests her head against his chest and weeps a little. Rajat strokes her hair, grateful at finally being needed. Oh
, the women of this family. How he loves them, with a pure and helpless love.
“Grandfather refused to give permission for an angioplasty,” Sarojini says. “As soon as the medicines made him feel well enough to talk, he told the staff that he was a lawyer and he would sue them if they did anything to him against his will. All my life he’s plagued me with his stubbornness! He ordered the nurses to get out. ‘I’ll call you if I think I’m dying,’ that’s what he told them. To me, he kept saying, ‘I’ve got to see her.’ But I didn’t know how to get hold of you. I didn’t have your phone number with me. I was so panicked, it took me a while even to remember the name of the hotel.”
Leaning over in the too large jacket, Korobi looks like a child playing dress-up. She strokes the old man’s ankles, blackish and puffy. In the ice-blue night-light, she is lovelier than she has ever been, and more remote.
“Grandfather, I’m here. I’m so sorry. Does it hurt a lot?”
High and shaky, her voice, too, is that of a child on her way to tears. The old man does not respond. His eyes are shut. His thin chest barely moves. The machine to the left of the bed displays waves of green and yellow on its screen. To the right, an IV stand dispenses liquid into a tube attached to the old man’s arm. The steady drip of the translucent fluid is strangely comforting. Watching it, Rajat feels that something, finally, is working right. And not just here. On every floor of the hospital, in every room darkened for rest or blinding bright with emergency, the machines, untiring, so much more reliable than the frail human body, are doing their job. He allows the IV’s rhythm to pull him into an amphibious space between sleep and waking where nothing is required of him.
Suddenly Sarojini gives a cry that startles Rajat into consciousness. He sees the old man struggling with his oxygen mask, trying to pull it off. Sarojini rushes to the bed.
“Stop it, you! Stop it right now. Hei Bhagaban, he’ll be the death of me yet.”
She jabs at the button for the nurse, shouts to Rajat to help her. Still in a daze, Rajat makes it to the bed and pins down the old man’s wrists. The old man is no match for Rajat, but his eyes plead so furiously that Rajat’s hands slacken. The old man needs to say something crucial to Korobi before he dies. Rajat knows he has no right to keep him from that.
The oxygen mask is off now and dangling from a tube. The old man fights to sit up, gasping, choking. Korobi hurries to kneel at his side. She tries to smooth the wrinkles from his forehead.
“Please don’t strain yourself, Grandfather. You’ll have another attack. Please lie down. You can tell me later, when you’re stronger.”
The old man whispers something that Rajat can’t hear.
A guilty look flashes across Korobi’s face. “Oh, no, don’t say that. I’m the one who’s sorry. The engagement ceremony put too much strain on you. And then I upset you with my clothes. I’ll never wear this outfit again. I promise. And I didn’t mean what I—”
But the old man keeps mumbling. His eyes seem to have lost the ability to focus. They stare blankly past Korobi’s shoulder at the wall’s grayness. His lips open and close stiffly, like a marionette’s. Then his gaze fixes on something, making Korobi glance nervously over her shoulder. By the time she turns back, his head has lolled forward like a flower on a broken stalk. Two nurses run in; a doctor follows. They try various resuscitation procedures that Rajat watches in horrified fascination. But they all know it’s too late. Bimal Prasad Roy, barrister, whose acerbic words had, for so many years, intimidated family members, clients, and those lawyers foolhardy enough to oppose him in court, has relinquished speech forever.
Death demands certain homages from the living, and into these Rajat dives with relief. He chastises the medical staff for negligence; makes arrangements with the funeral service for the body to be picked up the next day; calls his mother to inform her that he will stay at Korobi’s tonight; and phones Sarojini’s home to sternly order a blubbering Cook to get some food ready. In the car, he sits between the two women. Sarojini sobs into the fisted edge of her sari until, exhausted, she lays her head on Rajat’s shoulder and closes her eyes. Korobi sits upright, staring mutinously out of the window. But after an hour of being stalled in a traffic jam by road construction (at midnight!), she wilts against him. Now she is asleep, head wedged under his chin, mouth slightly open, a hand clutching his coat lapel. A sudden pothole causes her to butt her head against his chin, making him bite his tongue. He can taste the salt of blood. He doesn’t mind.
Sleep, Cara. I’ll take care of you.
THREE
Stillness has invaded 26 Tarak Prasad Roy Road, the stillness of a fairy tale where dark magic has cast the kingdom into a waking dream. In all the fifty-five years Sarojini has lived here with Bimal, she can’t remember feeling adrift like this, not even after Anu’s death. The others, too, seem to be lost. Cook stands at the kitchen karhai, staring at the potato curry until it grows charred. Bahadur watches the gardener boy overwater the oleanders, but where are the succulent curses into which he would usually have launched? And Korobi, who has not been to college since that night of death, spends her days in bed, leafing through the musty books she has taken from her grandfather’s library. The household has given up on breakfast, even the sacrosanct cup of morning tea. If Rajat, who comes by each evening, hadn’t insisted on having dinner here, that meal, too, might have disappeared.
If it weren’t for Rajat, what would have happened to them? Sarojini wonders in gratitude. Each evening he enters the house brisk as a sea wind. He plans the next day’s menu and gives Bahadur shopping instructions. He checks whether the utility bills have been paid, whether Sarojini has enough diabetes medicine. He cajoles the women into walking around the garden with him. Best of all, he doesn’t try to fill the silence with small talk.
The newspapers that Bimal Roy scrutinized each morning have piled up, unread, on the drawing-room table. Cocooned in shock, the household remains ignorant of the Godhra riots and their aftermath, raging along the western edge of the country. Even if they had known, would the incidents have penetrated their numbness? The sorrows of others seem so distant compared to our own.
Among all this torpor, Sarojini alone cannot seem to rest. She opens the doors of spare rooms she has not visited in years. She peers into the dark, cool pantry that smells of palm-date molasses, which Bimal had loved. Tonight, once the rest of the household has collapsed into sleep, she goes into the bedroom she has shared all these years with Bimal, removes his clothes from the almirah, and searches under the newspapers lining the shelves.
Sarojini knows, guiltily, that Rajat would be upset if he knew what she was doing. He has asked her to stay away from this room, to sleep with Korobi. Much as she loves Korobi, Sarojini dislikes this arrangement. The girl is a restless sleeper, kicking her own pillows off the bed and then reaching for Sarojini’s, jolting her from uneasy dreams. Once awake, Sarojini cannot fall asleep again because the room is too quiet, devoid of Bimal’s disruptive snores.
There’s nothing under the lining. A disappointed Sarojini turns, then catches her reflection in the floor-length, oval mirror. It startles her: a woman so colorless that she is almost transparent. White sari, bereft of the bright borders that she has always favored. Bare forehead, wiped clean of the vermilion of wifehood. Bare wrists, ears, neck, the jewelry jumbled into a drawer until someone—but who, now that Bimal is gone?—remembers to take it to the bank. Out of old habit the woman in the mirror pushes phantom bangles up her arm, then shakes her head with an embarrassed laugh.
If Sarojini stands in front of the mirror long enough and unfocuses her eyes the right way, the woman’s image fades. Instead, Bimal appears in front of her. Sometimes he is knobby and querulous, as in recent months, waiting for her to peel him his after-dinner oranges. Sometimes he gives her a lopsided, newly married smile that takes her breath away. Today he is dressed in a cream kurta with an elaborate paisley design. When she sees that, Sarojini begins to shake. That was the kurta he had worn the night thei
r daughter died.
What’s the right thing for me to do now, Bimal? Should I tell Korobi?
She wants a sign to guide her. But his face is frozen into the shocked expression it wore eighteen years ago. His eyes are furious with loss.
The truth is like a mountain of iron pressing on my chest. Still, I’m willing to bear it. If only I could be sure that it’s the best thing for Korobi—
He had thrown away the kurta after that night, in spite of its having been one of his favorites, and expensive. He wouldn’t even let her give it to Bahadur.
Tell me! All my life you insisted on making the decisions until I forgot how to think for myself. And then you leave me like this?
Tears fill her eyes. That’s always been Sarojini’s problem—she cries when she gets angry. When, having blinked away the wetness, she looks again, the mirror holds only her bleached, blanched self.
An unexpected by-product of Rajat’s nightly visits to the Roy household is that Asif has struck up a friendship with Bahadur.
At first Asif had looked upon the Nepalese gatekeeper with disdain. Dozing by the gate in a frayed khaki uniform that had not encountered an iron in years, the old man clearly belonged to that obsolete generation of retainers whose dowdy servanthood was their entire identity. His face wreathed in a gap-toothed grin, he salaamed Rajat entirely too many times as Asif pulled onto the gravel driveway. Bahadur embodied everything Asif detested about working for the rich, everything he was determined to avoid. So he would give a curt nod in response to the old man’s effusive greeting, refuse his offer of garam garam chai with spices from Kathmandu, put on a pair of fake Armani sunglasses, and pretend to sleep. Through the rolled-down window, the scent of the tea, brewed with generous helpings of milk and sugar on a kerosene stove outside the gatehouse, assailed him. A nice, hot cupful would have improved the quality of these boring, mosquito-infested evenings. But Asif didn’t believe in being obligated to people unless he liked them.