“One little bit can’t do any harm, especially when it’s blessed by the goddess,” said the wife calmly, and she broke off a piece of the sweet and put it in her mouth.
“Babu….”
It was the darwan, looking uncomfortable. “What is it?”
“There’s a woman outside, demanding to be let in. I tried to turn her away, but she claims she’s”—he pointed to the maid—”her mother. She’s making a lot of noise. Shall I ask the bearer-boy to come help me get rid of her?”
The sister looked at the maid, who stood beside the wife’s chair, stricken into stillness.
The husband, who had also been watching the maid, spoke slowly, consideringly. “No. Bring her in. I think we should hear what she has to say.”
They could hear the woman’s voice long before she appeared around the bend of the drive, its broad peasant accent the same as the maid’s, but crude and grating in a way hers had never been. “So this is where she ended up, the little slut. Who would’ve thought it!”
And the darwan’s outraged, scolding whisper, “Watch your mouth, old woman. This is the house of bhadralok, decent people, not a bustee like you come from.”
The woman’s laugh was gravelly with contempt. The maid winced from it as though it were something solid, flung across the evening at her face. “Don’t talk to me about bhadralok! I know more about them than you ever will. I’ve seen the inside of a lot of mansions in my time—palaces, even—and I’m not talking about drawing rooms and dining halls either.”
At first when she saw her, the sister was surprised that this woman should be the mother of the maid. In her garish yellow sari and cheap silver jewelry, she seemed to belong to a lower order of humanity, her lips pulled back from her teeth in a predatory smirk. And yet, in the creases of that face which had long since given up all claim to innocence, the sister could see traces of a certain ruined beauty. It struck her that at one time men must have forgotten to breathe when they watched the mother walk down the street.
“So,” said the mother, advancing on the maid. “You’ve been hiding out here, have you, you sly thing, while I’m going crazy looking everywhere for you. And so’s Biru.” Addressing the husband with an obsequious bow, she explained, “They had a little tiff, husband and wife, and my silly daughter here, she ran away.”
“He’s not my husband,” the maid said through stiff lips.
The mother ignored her. “It’s lucky I was at Bappi’s Tea Stall across from the temple bus stop today. The goddess’s grace, what else can you call it. I’d just started on my kima paratha when Kamala lets out a yell that just about makes me choke. Ai, Lakkhi-Pishi, she says, isn’t that your girl, the one that’s missing. I didn’t even finish my paratha, I tell you, I jumped right up—couldn’t take a chance on losing my daughter again, could I—and ran out. She was already on the bus, but fortunately another one came right away. And here I am.” Her grin brown and smug in her seamed face, she turned to the maid. “So if you’ll just gather your things, we’ll thank the babu and his good wife here, and be on our way.”
“I’m not going,” said the maid, her voice small but definite.
“What?”
“I’m not going.”
“Oh yes you are, even if I have to drag you by your hair every step of the way.”
The sister took a swift, shocked breath and turned to the wife, who sat as though in a dream, as though none of this were really happening. The maid, too, turned to her. “Please, Didi, don’t make me go.” She gripped the handle of the wife’s chair with white fingernails.
“I’m your mother. I have the right.”
Looking only at the wife, the maid said, “She sends men to my room at night, her and Biru, for the money.”
There was a sudden hush in the air, as before the baisakhi storms that rip the sky open. The sister saw that the darwan’s mouth had fallen comically open, and that the aunt’s eyes glittered with victory. But the look on her brother-in-law’s face she couldn’t read.
“That’s a lie, a stinking, bare-faced lie, you bitch. You’d better stop babbling and come with me right this minute….”
The wife’s chair fell over with a crash as she stood up, and the packet of prasad dropped from her lap, the sweetmeat rolling on the ground until it came to rest next to the husband’s chappal. She swayed a little, hand pressed to her belly. The sister noted with alarm that her lips were ash color, and she too rose.
“Get rid of this—creature,” said the wife to the husband in a slurred, sleepwalker’s voice. She waited until he nodded at the darwan, and then held out her hand for the maid. “Sarala,” the words came out jerky, disjointed. “Help me to my room.”
As the sister rushed to take her other arm, she heard the mother shout behind her, “Creature—who’s she calling creature? And, babu, don’t think you can get rid of me so easily. I know my rights. You might be rich, but I can get a hundred people from the bustee to come back here with me tomorrow. Make a stink like you won’t believe.” Her voice dipped knowingly. “Don’t think I can’t see the real reason you’re keeping my girl on—that pregnant wife of yours isn’t much good for anything else right now, is she?”
And the darwan, shoving her before him, “Get out, get out, you filthy-minded witch, before I bash your head in. Threaten the babu in his own home, will you? Just you try coming back. …”
“Break a stick across her back when I do get hold of her …” screamed the mother.
“Out, out this minute….”
And the husband leaning smoothly back in his chair, the dark pooling around his bone-white kurta, a curiously pleased expression on his face.
By the time Dr. Hazra arrived, the wife was delirious with fever, and the ache in her belly was worse. She tossed on the bed, throwing off the covers they tried to keep on her, hitting out when the aunt tried to put on another poultice, and when her husband leaned over to ask her how she felt, she didn’t seem to know him. The doctor gave her a shot and called the hospital, for she would have to be moved right away.
“We’ll probably keep her there for the next few weeks, until it’s safe for the baby to be born. She needs supervision. But most of all”—he looked accusingly at the rest of the household—”she needs to be kept from getting agitated.”
“I can’t go,” the wife spoke in a tired whisper. “Who’ll take care of Khuku? Who’ll …?”
“My dear,” said the husband, taking her hands solicitously between his, “if the doctor says you must go, then of course you must. None of us like the thought of you being away, but we have to think of whatever’s best for you—and the baby. You need not worry—your sister is here after all. And the maid.”
“Yes, please, don’t worry,” said the sister, pushing back a damp strand of hair from the wife’s forehead, though every muscle in her body tightened at the thought of remaining in this house without her sister.
The wife beckoned the sister closer, until her ear was close to her mouth. “Promise me you’ll stay until I get back,” she said in the faint tones of one who is already far away. “Promise me you’ll take care of Khuku. And, Sarala—promise me you’ll take care of her too.”
“I promise,” said the sister, trying to keep the doubt from her voice. She felt weak and incapable, weighed down with misgivings. But what else could she say?
In the week after the wife was hospitalized, the sister was amazed at how smoothly everything at home continued to run. The mali watered and fertilized and mowed as usual, and even trimmed, without having to be told, the mango branches that were blocking the light from the living-room window. The cook performed magnificently, fixing a Mughlai lamb dish that the husband claimed was better than anything he had done before; the bearer-boy came to work on time; and the ayah didn’t get into a single fight with the other servants all week. Even the little girl didn’t cry for her mother, as the sister had worried she might. She went for her bath unprotestingly and let the sister comb out the tangles in her hair without kicking
or screaming. She ate a good lunch and took her nap, and in the evenings she played checkers with her father quite cheerfully until bedtime.
The sister was relieved, but her relief was tinged with dismay. At first she’d interpreted this sudden spate of good behavior as a temporary, shocked reaction to the wife’s absence, but as the weeks passed she saw that she had been wrong. The household had closed over the departure soundlessly, without sorrow, the way the fluted leaves of the water hyacinth close over the surface of a pond after the bathers have left. As though it were the most natural thing. Would it be the same if—she couldn’t keep the thought from her mind though she tried hard to push it away—her sister were dead? Is this, finally, all a life amounts to, all the mark it makes on others, she asked herself as she turned restlessly—but carefully, so as to not wake the others—on the large pallet that had been put together by joining two mattresses on the nursery floor.
The pallet was in the nursery because there had been a problem with sleeping arrangements. The wife had asked that the aunt sleep in the nursery with the little girl, while the maid slept on the floor of the sister’s bedroom (for what reason the sister thought better not to ask). But from the second night on, the little girl had refused, insisting that the sister sleep with her instead.
“She snores,” she said, pointing to the old woman. “And she smells too.”
The aunt, bristling, had said that the wife had asked her specifically to sleep in the nursery, and no one was going to stop her from carrying out the poor sick woman’s wishes.
They’d reached a compromise by having the sister join the other two in the nursery, but when she’d asked if the maid could sleep there too, the aunt had put her foot down quite firmly. The room was too small, and besides, she wasn’t going to sleep in the same space as a servant girl, especially one with questionable morals. (After the mother had shown up, there had been lengthy and heated discussions about the maid’s morals throughout the house, though not in the wife’s hearing. In the dining room the aunt had held forth on how it was a scandal that a decent family should be asked to put up with a woman who was, by her own admission, no better than a call girl. And in the kitchen a vindicated ayah had told everyone how she knew, just knew, right from the first that the girl was evil.)
So the maid slept, as before, in the storeroom. And she was probably better off there, thought the sister, sighing, as for the tenth time she pushed the little girl’s foot off her stomach and clamped a pillow over her ear to block out the aunt’s vigorous snores.
The sister had never been a heavy sleeper. And now, what with the new sleeping arrangements and worry over the wife’s health and that of her unborn child, she spent long stretches of the night lying awake. Staring at the walls streaked with moonlight, she thought of her last visit to the hospital. How the wife had lain in the narrow military-green cot she was confined to at all times by the doctor’s orders, her face leached of animation, pale as old ivory. How in spite of the open windows her room had smelled faintly of urine (for she wasn’t allowed to get up to go to the bathroom) and another odor the sister couldn’t quite place but thought of as the smell of helplessness.
Lying awake, the sister grew familiar with the night noises of house and garden, the jhi-jhi insects chirping in the honeysuckle, the owls hooting mournfully from the distant ata tree, the geckos calling tik-tik-tik as they slithered over the whitewashed corridor walls. The watchman’s shoes clattered on the cobbles outside the gate as he patrolled the streets with his baton, raising his voice periodically in the cautionary kaun hai. The dripping faucet in the bathroom sounded as though someone were impatiently tapping his fingers along a table; the door frames creaked and settled with the noise of knuckles being cracked; and the halting shhk-shhk of the ceiling fan was disturbingly like a person shuffling along in bedroom slippers.
But on this night in the beginning of the second week the sister heard a different sound, one that made her sit up in bed with a hand pressed against her pounding chest. It was a very soft padding, as of naked feet on marbled mosaic, coming down the corridor. What frightened the sister was the fact that it was the sound of someone trying to be quiet.
She looked down at the sleeping child beside her, the old woman breathing loudly with her mouth open. She wanted to lie down again, to plunge, like them, into an uncomplicated rest. But she couldn’t. She slipped off the mattress cautiously, in spite of the voice in her head that cried no, no, no. She pulled her sari tight across her chest, unlatched the bedroom door, and looked out through the crack.
A man was disappearing around the bend of the corridor. She didn’t recognize him. Only a little moonlight seeped into the passage, and he was dressed in the sleeveless genji and white dhoti that most Bengali men wear on hot nights. Could it be one of the servants? Did the maid have a “friend” after all? The sister followed, keeping to the shadows, though she knew that she shouldn’t. Unwise, dangerous, screamed the voice in her head. What does it matter who he is? But something about the man drew her on. When she stopped at the corner to peer into the gloom, she saw that he was knocking on the door of the storeroom, muffled, urgent beats that the sister could barely hear above the thudding of her heart.
“Who is it?” she heard the maid call, her tone wary. “Who is it?”
The man—she couldn’t see his face yet—whispered something the sister couldn’t catch, but she heard the latch click open. The maid appeared in the doorway, face swollen with sleep, hair and clothes disarranged. “Khuku’s ill? Where is she? What’s wrong? I’d better go help Choto-didi right away. …” And then more loudly, as the man tried to push her back into the storeroom, “No, I beg you, no, stop it, let me go, please. How can you be like this with Didi sick in the hospital?”
“Don’t act so virtuous,” the man hissed. “Once a whore, always a whore.”
The sister recognized the voice. Dizziness swept through her—or was it terror, mixed with rage on her sister’s behalf—and she had to hold on to the edge of the wall.
The man tried to clamp a hand over the maid’s mouth but she twisted away. “Don’t worry, no one will know. I’ll make it worth your while,” he said with a laugh that struck the sister like a shard of ice. “And it’ll be a lot more fun with me than it was with those stinking peasants at the bustee.”
“Let me go, Dadababu.” The maid was kicking at the man’s shins now. When the man didn’t release her, she clawed at his face, her voice rising threateningly. “Or else I’ll scream loud enough to wake everyone in the house.”
The man swore, low and vicious, clapping a hand to his cheek. He shoved the maid backward, and the sister heard her body thudding against the wall. “Bitch! You’ll be sorry.”
The sister caught a glimpse of her brother-in-law’s rage-engorged face. And then she was running faster than she ever had in her life to get back to the bedroom before he saw her.
For years afterward, she would ask herself why she’d felt so ashamed, so guilty, as though she had been the clandestine one. She would wish that she’d stayed and confronted him, if only with a look. She would wonder if that might have made a difference to what happened later.
The next day the sister sat with a late-morning cup of tea on the balcony, thinking. The idea of facing her brother-in-law’s polite inquiries at the breakfast table—Is everything all right, Did you sleep well, Is there anything I can get you on my way back from the office—had filled her with nausea, and she had stayed in bed, complaining of a headache, until he left home. Now as she listened to the maid reading aloud to the little girl, her voice rising and falling melodiously, with no trace of the night’s turbulences in it, she wondered what she should do. Should she indicate to her that she knew what had happened and try, together, to figure out a plan so that it didn’t occur again? Should she approach her brother-in-law with her dangerous knowledge and blackmail him into good behavior? Should she tell her sister? She remembered the wife’s face, white against the white hospital pillow, her eyes that passed
without curiosity over people’s faces, as though they were part of a distant past which no longer held meaning for her—and knew she couldn’t. Nor could she undertake the other actions—she was not the type. Youngest in the household and a girl besides, she’d always had people making decisions for her, or at least telling her what to do, praising her for being tractable and obedient, which as everyone knew were the cardinal virtues of womanhood. The thought of acting on her own, of setting in motion some uncontrollable force that might eventually shatter her sister’s marriage (for she wasn’t tractable, her sister, not like her—who knew what she might take it in her head to do if she found out what had happened?) filled her with dread.
And besides, she told herself, staring down at the dappled sunlight playing over the red and gold dahlias that edged the driveway, perhaps she was overreacting. These things happened—even in her sheltered provincial existence she’d heard of them often enough. At least her brother-in-law didn’t have a “keep,” a mistress set up in a separate household, as affluent Bengali men often did. He didn’t go off with his friends for “musical” weekends which featured, as everyone knew, singers and dancers who were happy to provide other services as well. In his way he loved his wife and was a good father to his little girl. Perhaps the best thing would be to forget what had happened, to forgive him his moment’s lapse (he was a man, after all, with those uncontrollable male urges she’d been warned of time and again). To pray it wouldn’t recur.
“Choto-didi! Choto-didi!”
Startled, the sister looked down to see the darwan’s daughter, who lived in the servant’s quarter by the gate, running toward the house, panting.
“Choto-didi, there’s a crowd of people at the gate, along with that one’s mother.” (Here she jerked her chin at the maid, who had let the book fall to the floor.) “They’re trying to get in. My father’s still at the office with the car, and the bearer’s gone to the market. What shall we do?”