Maybe she no longer knew how to let me. Maybe people were right when they said that the death of her husband and baby in a cholera epidemic that had struck Calcutta overnight when I was about five had killed a part of her too. (Why had that explanation always seemed too facile for me?) At any rate, she’d relinquished me to Deepa Mashi who, herself childless, enthusiastically took on the role of second mother, commending and cajoling and consoling me all those years, asking embarrassing questions and, when I refused to answer, creating vociferous scenes dramatic enough to satisfy any teenager’s need for attention. Other girls might have resented the interference, but I was grateful. When I felt myself dissolving before my mother’s even, passionless gaze, Deepa Mashi’s voice, laughing at my follies, scolding me for my misdeeds, gave me solidity and shape. Secretly, guiltily, I wished I could have been her real daughter.
“We should plan your wedding outfit,” Mashi is saying now. “Who knows when you’ll come visit us next. And weddings have a habit of happening suddenly.”
I want to explain to her about Bijoy. He’s not like other Indians—certainly not the ones Aunt would know, engineers and accountants with responsible gold-rimmed eyeglasses and Parker fountain pens in their breast pockets—upright, virtuous, and deadly boring. On our second date he’d told me that he found me attractive and was interested in getting together, but wasn’t ready to be tied down by marriage. I’d felt angry, insulted—far more so than if an American man had said the same thing. I’d taken the bus home that night, after informing him in chilled tones that we’d better not see each other again.
And we hadn’t for a month, during which I thought incessantly, obsessively, of him. His utter disregard for the rules of my youth—and surely his as well—fascinated me. At the end of the month I contrived to get myself invited to a party where I knew he’d be present. I accepted his offer to escort me home. I let him kiss me, and when his lips pressed down hard on mine, his tongue forcing its way into my mouth, his hands deftly insistent on my kurta buttons, I told myself it was what I wanted. A liberated relationship, no strings attached. A sailing into uncharted and amazing areas of experience that someone like my mother couldn’t even imagine. I’d pushed back the feeling of shame, the old voices echoing in my head, Men don’t do these things to women they respect.
But it will only distress Mashi if I tell her I’m living with a man I’m not—and might never be—married to. Her world is constructed of simpler lines, its shapes filled in with bright primary colors that do not bleed together, as in the calendars of gods that hang on the walls of her living room. So it is much easier, as I sit under the slow-revolving ceiling fan, lulled by the sun-warm smell of jasmine and gardenia from the garden, by the shhh shhh sound of the mali watering the lawn, to let myself fall into her fantasy.
“I’ll wear a Benarasi silk, I guess, except I don’t want any of those traditional gaudy colors.” A part of me is amused at my own emphatic tone, as though this might actually happen. “You know, orange and maroon, eggplant-purple, bloodred.” I realize I am thinking of my mother’s wedding sari. I came across it once, wrapped in a blanket and thrust into the bottom of a trunk, like a sordid secret. “You can’t ever wear them later, especially in America.” I am pleased at the cleverness with which I’ve let drop the fact—which will duly find its way to my mother—that I’m not intending to come back to India. Not to stay. “Maybe saffron would be nice—a pale saffron. Yes, that’s it. I want a saffron Benarasi for the wedding.”
Mashi is silent for a long moment. Then in a strangely quiet voice she says, “Oh, my dear, not saffron, not that.”
“Why not?” I ask, surprised by her uncharacteristic seriousness.
“Saffron is such a sorrowful color.”
“Funny you should say that. I always thought of it as rather festive—the color of beginnings.”
“I guess you’re right. It’s just that it reminds me of …” Deepa Mashi’s voice disappears into a sigh.
“Of what, Mashi?”
“Oh, nothing, nothing, it’s only a story,” says Mashi, twisting her fingers together. “A sad story, a bad-luck tale, not meant for brides-to-be. Come, let me make you some cardamom tea—I remember how much you used to enjoy that.”
But like most Indian women, Mashi is not good at saying no. So when, intrigued by the uneasiness in her voice, I insist, she tells me.
Once there was a young wife, the apple of her husband’s eye. She was beautiful and charming and intelligent, and had been to college as well, a rare achievement for women in those days. Her husband was fond of bringing up this fact in the course of conversations with friends—especially as she didn’t flaunt her education and deferred, in most instances, to his superior judgment.
The young wife, whom everyone considered a lucky woman, lived in an old and respected part of Calcutta in a marble mansion that had belonged to the family since the time of the grandfather. (The grandfather, whose portrait hung, majestically framed in antique brass, in the hall, had been famous for his charitable works—free medical clinics and slum schools—another fact that the husband liked to mention in conversations though he was not involved in any of them.) While the husband was away at work (he was an assistant manager at a very proper British bank that had stayed on in India after Independence), she occupied herself with household duties, as a wife should, telling the cook which of the master’s favorite dishes to prepare for dinner, and supervising the maids as they dusted the tall armoires and wall clocks and polished the ivory and brass figurines that sat in various alcoves around the house. She took long walks in the garden and advised the mali on what to plant in the flower beds that edged the circular driveway. And when the darwan (who doubled as chauffeur) stood up with a smart salute from his stool at the wrought-iron gates which were kept closed at all times, she wished him good day with a smile and asked after his wife and children, who lived in the servant’s quarters above the garage and whose names she always remembered.
She was additionally lucky, people said, in that she didn’t have a mother-in-law to contend with, but it is very probable that she would have got along well with one. Her mother had taught her to be respectful of elders, and she took good care of her husband’s aunt, an ancient and somewhat deaf widow who lived with them, in spite of the biting remarks the old woman let drop from time to time. She also took good care of her daughter, bathing and feeding her with her own hands instead of turning her over to the ayah as so many of the women of her class did, and reading to her in the afternoons as they lay together in the cool white nursery bed until the little girl fell asleep.
In her spare time the wife read the books which the husband picked up from the library for her on his way back from the office, and practiced her singing. (She had a good voice and an interest in contemporary music, and the husband, who liked to boast of this talent of hers as well, had hired a lady teacher who came to the house every Thursday to teach her Rabindra Sangeet.) She wrote many letters, mainly to her family, mentioning always how happy she was, how loved and protected, how blessed—especially now that she was expecting another baby. In one of them she asked her younger sister, who was still unmarried and thus without responsibilities of her own, if she could come and stay with her for a few months, just until her delivery. It was a little lonely at times in this great big house where voices echoed and footsteps rang hollow down the corridors. Maybe it would be a little boy this time, she ended, like her husband wanted, a charming fair-skinned boy with curly hair and bright eyes, to delight their hearts and carry on the family name.
The maid servant arrived soon after that.
The two sisters were walking under the fragrant neem trees in the early evening, taking advantage of the cool breeze before the sun disappeared behind the coconut palms and mosquitoes invaded the garden. For the younger sister had come right away, pleased and even a little gratified that the sister she had looked up to all her life, who everyone said was prettier and smarter and sweeter-natured and who had marrie
d so much better than she herself could hope to, actually needed her. Besides, her annual exams were over and the prospect of summer in provincial Burdwan stretched ahead of her, long and barren and parched like the fields she stared out at each morning from the windows of her father’s house. In Calcutta there would be shops to visit and movies to see, the grounds of the Maidan and the Victoria Memorial to promenade in, and musical soirees to attend. And even the Kalighat temple, noisy with chanted prayers and the frantic bleating of sacrificial goats, where her sister took the aunt every Tuesday, was an exciting change from the small Shiva shrine back home. She liked her brother-in-law too, though she was a bit in awe of him—especially when, on workday mornings, he appeared at breakfast dressed in suit and tie, his shoes spit-shiny and the stiff collars of his shirts precisely ironed. He made her uncomfortable (although she never would have said it to anyone) with his easy charm as he asked after her health, with his sophisticated jokes that she didn’t understand. With the look that flickered briefly, hotly in his eyes when her sister wasn’t around.
The woman was standing outside the wrought-iron gates, perfectly still, her head haloed by the setting sun, so that when the sister first caught sight of her she seemed dazzle-bright, a forest goddess materialized out of a children’s fairy tale. But of course she wasn’t. She was only a poor woman in a coarse, green-bordered sari, with high, hungry cheekbones and shadows in the hollow of her throat. She was good-looking enough in a primitive adivasi way, but no one would have mistaken her—at least on second look—for anything except a working-class girl who’d been out of work awhile.
“Mistress,” she said in a broad rural accent when she saw the women staring at her, “do you need a maid?”
The sister expected the wife to say no. Things like this had happened before, in spite of this being a neighborhood that housed the cream of the Calcutta families. Sometimes tramps would wander up to the gates, ragged bearded men who wanted food in exchange for a day’s work and turned sullen when told they weren’t needed. Street urchins would try to climb over the wall to get at the mango tree, even when the fruit was green and hard and bitter. The beggar women were the worst. They would grip the wrought-iron spears of the gate with clawlike fingers and cry that they had hungry children at home, could the little mother let them have just one cup of rice. But of course you couldn’t, as the husband always reminded them, because news of it would travel along the beggar grapevine and the next day a hundred others would descend on them.
The sister paused for the wife to call the darwan, who was washing the black Studebaker at the other end of the driveway, and ask him—as she had done on those other occasions—to make the woman leave. So she was surprised when instead she heard her ask the woman what she could do.
“Anything,” said the woman. “If you show me how to, I’ll learn. I’m a good worker—I won’t be any trouble to you.” Her voice, though respectful, wasn’t obsequious like that of most servants. Bell-clear, it resonated in the evening air in spite of the way her collarbones rose sharp and fragile from her flesh.
“Do you have family?” asked the older sister.
“Yes,” said the woman after a slight pause, “the kind it’s better not to have.” She didn’t offer explanations.
“Where will you go if I say no?”
The woman shrugged, her face calm with the look of a lake over which many storms have passed.
The young wife thought for a while. Then she lifted the gate latch and motioned the woman to follow her. The sister, concerned, tried to tell her that it wasn’t a good idea, that her brother-in-law would surely be displeased. But the wife had begun a casual discussion about baby quilts—whether a lining of imported satin, which the husband favored, would be better than the traditional red malmal that was supposed to bring good luck to newborns—and she didn’t get a chance.
The sister was right, of course. There was a scene at dinner when the husband found out that his wife had hired a woman to be her personal maid without consulting him.
“First of all you don’t need another servant. As it is, Ayah doesn’t have enough to do. And then, where will she stay? The servant’s quarters are full already.”
“She could stay in the house,” the wife said in her soft voice. “We have so many empty rooms.”
“In the house! You want to put her in the house! What d’you know of this woman? She could be a thief or, worse still, the spy for a gang of dacoits. Remember what happened at the Dasguptas last year, the whole family murdered in their beds, and later the police found out that the maid had let the killers in.”
“That’s right,” said the old aunt (for she could hear well enough when she wanted to). “Asking for trouble, you are. Half those women are prostitutes anyway.”
“I don’t think this girl’s like that,” said the wife. She folded her hands over the swell of her belly, fixed her luminous eyes on her husband, and waited until he said, grudgingly, “Let me take a look at her.”
So the woman was summoned. The husband’s eyes slid over the dark glow of her new-washed face, the neatly pulled-back hair that brought out the arresting shape of her cheek-bones. The slim, straight body, the taut belly, the sinuous curve of breast and hip that the old green sari didn’t quite hide. (But perhaps the sister was only imagining this.) Then he said in a voice which still sounded annoyed that he was willing to try her out for a month or so, but only if his wife took full responsibility for anything that went wrong.
“I will,” said the wife, giving him a smile of grateful brilliance and clasping his hand in hers, though she knew that the old aunt frowned on such forward behavior on the part of wives. But the sister, who sensed that the husband was not really annoyed at all, crossed her fingers under the table to avert bad luck and said a prayer for her sister.
That was how the maid—let us call her Sarala—came to the house.
The maid was as good as her word. Quick and alert, in a few weeks she learned all that the wife showed her, from embroidering baby diapers to mixing medicinal oils according to the special recipe passed down to the wife by her mother. And she was a hard worker. Up at dawn, she would be waiting on the balcony with a pot of the basil tea considered particularly beneficial for pregnant women by the time the wife emerged from the bedroom. Once the husband left for work, she dusted the wife’s dressing table, lovingly lining up the combs and brushes, the little pots of kumkum and sindur and kajal, and arranging in their velvet cases the jewelry the wife was increasingly too tired to put away. She washed her fine cotton saris by hand and dried them in the shady part of the terrace so they would smell sun-fresh without the colors fading. She massaged the wife’s swollen feet with the medicinal oil and never tired of running down to the kitchen to bring her up a glass of chilled nimbu-pani whenever she felt nauseous. Even in the hot afternoons when the rest of the servants disappeared for their siestas, she would sit in the passage outside her mistress’s bedroom, hemming one of her petticoats or letting out a blouse, and keeping the little girl, who often woke early from her nap, occupied with tales and rhymes so she wouldn’t go in and disturb her mothers sleep.
Sometimes the wife would call out in her gentle voice, “Why don’t you go and lie down for a bit, Sarala? I don’t mind if Khuku comes and plays on my bed.”
But the maid would always say, “Oh no, Didi (she had taken to calling her elder sister, just as her own sister did), I’m not tired. You please rest. Khukumoni is no trouble at all.”
At first the sister regarded the maid’s devotion to the wife with suspicion. (And yes, it must be admitted, even some jealousy. She didn’t like the business of the maid calling her sister didi, a title that was rightfully hers to use. A hot resentment pricked at her when she heard the wife speaking to the maid in the same affectionate tone she used toward her own sister.) She had never come across a servant quite like her. Even the old ones who had been in her father’s family for years were, though loyal, always taking advantage of their seniority to ask for favors—a
new shawl at Durga Puja time, gifts of money for the marriage of their children, longer vacations to visit family. The sister watched the maid intently for a slip—a glint of the eye, a twist of the lip, a careless word dropped to a fellow servant that would reveal her real motives. But there was nothing. Though polite to the other household help, the maid didn’t gossip with them. When the wife asked her if she needed anything—clothing, soap, another blanket—she said no. The sister noticed, too, how she took care to stay out of the husband’s way without making it obvious. How she pulled her thick hair back in a style she must have known was unattractive (for she was smart, this maid—the sister had seen that right away) and kept her sari modestly pulled around her shoulders at all times. How she chose, for her sleeping space, not the big alcove with the ceiling fan, as the wife had suggested, but a cramped and airless storeroom which could be locked from the inside.
After a month the sister was forced to admit to herself that she had been wrong. The maid loved the wife in the way intelligent animals love their keepers, with a ferocious and total loyalty, a forgetting of self. (The sister had heard tales of such beasts—cheetahs and house snakes and the great gray wolf-dogs that rajahs sometimes kept—killing for their masters, dying for them.) Perhaps it was because the wife was the first person to be truly kind to the maid, with a kindness that expects nothing in return.
One evening the sister watched the maid bring a footstool and a glass of honey-milk to the wife as she sat on the balcony. She saw the gracious smile with which the mistress took the drink from the maid, and the desperate bright joy that flashed across the maid’s face in response, and she forced herself, finally, to wipe the last traces of jealousy from her heart. When I am gone, she told herself, there will still be someone in this house to look after my sister.