Two weeks passed and there was no news of the woman, even though the husband had put a notice in the San Jose Mercury as well as a half-page ad in India West, which he photocopied and taped to neighborhood lampposts. The ad had a photo of her, a close-up taken in too-bright sunlight where she gazed gravely at something beyond the camera. WOMAN MISSING, read the ad. REWARD $100,000. (How on earth would he come up with that kind of money, asked his friends. The husband confessed that it would be difficult, but he’d manage somehow. His wife was more important to him, after all, than all the money in the world. And to prove it he went to the bank the very same day and brought home a sheaf of forms to fill so that he could take out a second mortgage on the house.) He kept calling the police station, too, but the police weren’t much help. They were working on it, they said. They’d checked the local hospitals and morgues, the shelters. They’d even sent her description to other states. But there were no leads. It didn’t look very hopeful.
So finally he called India and over a faulty long-distance connection that made his voice echo eerily in his ear told his mother what had happened. My poor boy, she cried, left all alone (the word flickered unpleasantly across his brain, left, left), how can you possibly cope with the household and a child as well. And when he admitted that yes, it was very difficult, could she perhaps come and help out for a while if it wasn’t too much trouble, she had replied that of course she would come right away and stay as long as he needed her, and what was all this American nonsense about too much trouble, he was her only son, wasn’t he. She would contact the wife’s family too, she ended, so he wouldn’t have to deal with that awkwardness.
Within a week she had closed up the little flat she had lived in since her husband’s death, got hold of a special family emergency visa, and was on her way. Almost as though she’d been waiting for something like this to happen, said some of the women spitefully. (These were his wife’s friends, though maybe acquaintances would be a more accurate word. His wife had liked to keep to herself, which had been just fine with him. He was glad, he’d told her several times, that she didn’t spend hours chattering on the phone like the other Indian wives.)
He was angry when this gossip reached him (perhaps because he’d had the same insidious thought for a moment when, at the airport, he noticed how happy his mother looked, her flushed excited face appearing suddenly young). Really, he said to his friends, some people see only what they want to see. Didn’t they think it was a good thing she’d come over? Oh yes, said his friends. Look how well the household was running now, the furniture dusted daily, laundry folded and put into drawers (his mother, a smart woman, had figured out the washing machine in no time at all). She cooked all his favorite dishes, which his wife had never managed to learn quite right, and she took such good care of the little boy, walking him to the park each afternoon, bringing him into her bed when he woke up crying at night. (He’d told her once or twice that his wife had never done that, she had this idea about the boy needing to be independent. What nonsense, said his mother.) Lucky man, a couple of his friends added and he silently agreed, although later he thought it was ironic that they would say that about a man whose wife had disappeared.
As the year went on, the husband stopped thinking as much about the wife. It wasn’t that he loved her any less, or that the shock of her disappearance was less acute. It was just that it wasn’t on his mind all the time. There would be stretches of time—when he was on the phone with an important client, or when he was watching after-dinner TV or driving his son to kiddie gym class—when he would forget that his wife was gone, that he had had a wife at all. And even when he remembered that he had forgotten, he would experience only a slight twinge, similar to what he felt in his teeth when he drank something too cold too fast. The boy, too, didn’t ask as often about his mother. He was sleeping through the nights again, he had put on a few pounds (because he was finally being fed right, said the grandmother), and he had started calling her “Ma,” just like his father did.
So it seemed quite natural for the husband to, one day, remove the photographs of his wife from the frames that sat on the mantelpiece and replace them with pictures of himself and his little boy that friends had taken on a recent trip to Great America, and also one of the boy on his grandma’s lap, holding a red birthday balloon, smiling (she said) exactly like his father used to at that age. He put the old pictures into a manila envelope and slid them to the back of a drawer, intending to show them to his son when he grew up. The next time his mother asked (as she had been doing ever since she got there), shall I put away all those saris and kameezes, it’ll give you more space in the closet, he said, if you like. When she said, it’s now over a year since the tragedy, shouldn’t we have a prayer service done at the temple, he said OK. And when she told him, you really should think about getting married again, you’re still young, and besides, the boy needs a mother, shall I contact second aunt back home, he remained silent but didn’t disagree.
Then one night while cooking cauliflower curry, her specialty, his mother ran out of hing, which was, she insisted, essential to the recipe. The Indian grocery was closed, but the husband remembered that sometimes his wife used to keep extra spices on the top shelf. So he climbed on a chair to look. There were no extra spices, but he did find something he had forgotten about, an old tea tin in which he’d asked her to hide her jewelry in case the house ever got burgled. Nothing major was ever kept there. The expensive wedding items were all stored in a vault. Still, the husband thought it would be a good idea to take them into the bank in the morning.
But when he picked up the tin it felt surprisingly light, and when he opened it, there were only empty pink nests of tissue inside.
He stood there holding the tin for a moment, not breathing. Then he reminded himself that his wife had been a careless woman. He’d often had to speak to her about leaving things lying around. The pieces could be anywhere—pushed to the back of her makeup drawer or forgotten under a pile of books in the spare room where she used to spend inordinate amounts of time reading. Nevertheless he was not himself the rest of the evening, so much so that his mother said, What happened, you’re awfully quiet, are you all right, your face looks funny. He told her he was fine, just a little pain in the chest area. Yes, he would make an appointment with the doctor tomorrow, no, he wouldn’t forget, now could she please leave him alone for a while.
The next day he took the afternoon off from work, but he didn’t go to the doctor. He went to the bank. In a small stuffy cubicle that smelled faintly of mold, he opened his safety deposit box to find that all her jewelry was gone. She hadn’t taken any of the other valuables.
The edges of the cubicle seemed to fade and darken at the same time, as though the husband had stared at a lightbulb for too long. He ground his fists into his eyes and tried to imagine her on that last morning, putting the boy in his stroller and walking the twenty minutes to the bank (they only had one car, which he took to work; they could have afforded another, but why, he said to his friends, when she didn’t even know how to drive). Maybe she had sat in this very cubicle and lifted out the emerald earrings, the pearl choker, the long gold chain. He imagined her wrapping the pieces carefully in plastic bags, the thin, clear kind one got at the grocery for vegetables, then slipping them into her purse. Or did she just throw them in anyhow, the strands of the necklace tangling, the brilliant green stones clicking against each other in the darkness inside the handbag, the boy laughing and clapping his hands at this new game.
At home that night he couldn’t eat any dinner, and before he went to bed he did thirty minutes on the dusty exercise bike that sat in the corner of the family room. Have you gone crazy, asked his mother. He didn’t answer. When he finally lay down, the tiredness did not put him to sleep as he had hoped. His calves ached from the unaccustomed strain, his head throbbed from the images that would not stop coming, and the bedclothes, when he pulled them up to his neck, smelled again of his wife’s hair.
Where
was she now? And with whom? Because surely she couldn’t manage on her own. He’d always thought her to be like the delicate purple passion-flower vines that they’d put up on trellises along their back fence, and once, early in the marriage, had presented her with a poem he’d written about this. He remembered how, when he held out the sheet to her, she’d stared at him for a long moment and a look he couldn’t quite read had flickered in her eyes. Then she’d taken the poem with a small smile. He went over and over all the men she might have known, but they (mostly his Indian friends) were safely married and still at home, every one.
The bed felt hot and lumpy. He tossed his feverish body around like a caught animal, punched the pillow, threw the blanket to the floor. Even thought, for a wild moment, of shaking the boy awake and asking him, Who did your mama see? And as though he had an inbuilt antenna that picked up his father’s agitation, in the next room the boy started crying (which he hadn’t done for months), shrill screams that left him breathless. And when his father and grandmother rushed to see what the problem was, he pushed them from him with all the strength in his small arms, saying, Go way, don’t want you, want Mama, want Mama.
After the boy had been dosed with gripe water and settled in bed again, the husband sat alone in the family room with a glass of brandy. He wasn’t a drinker. He believed that alcohol was for weak men. But somehow he couldn’t face the rumpled bed just yet, the pillows wrested onto the floor. The unknown areas of his wife’s existence yawning blackly around him like chasms. Should he tell the police, he wondered, would it do any good? What if somehow his friends came to know? Didn’t I tell you, right from the first, his mother would say. And anyway it was possible she was already dead, killed by a stranger from whom she’d hitched a ride, or by a violent, jealous lover. He felt a small, bitter pleasure at the thought, and then a pang of shame.
Nevertheless he made his way to the dark bedroom (a trifle unsteadily; the drink had made him light-headed) and groped in the bottom drawer beneath his underwear until he felt the coarse manila envelope with her photos. He drew it out and, without looking at them, tore the pictures into tiny pieces. Then he took them over to the kitchen, where the trash compactor was.
The roar of the compactor seemed to shake the entire house. He stiffened, afraid his mother would wake and ask what was going on, but she didn’t. When the machine ground to a halt, he took a long breath. Finished, he thought. Finished. Tomorrow he would contact a lawyer, find out the legal procedure for remarriage. Over dinner he would mention to his mother, casually, that it was OK with him if she wanted to contact second aunt. Only this time he didn’t want a college-educated woman. Even good looks weren’t that important. A simple girl, maybe from their ancestral village. Someone whose family wasn’t well off, who would be suitably appreciative of the comforts he could provide. Someone who would be a real mother to his boy.
He didn’t know then that it wasn’t finished. That even as he made love to his new wife (a plump, cheerful girl, good-hearted, if slightly unimaginative), or helped his daughters with their homework, or disciplined his increasingly rebellious son, he would wonder about her. Was she alive? Was she happy? With a sudden anger that he knew to be irrational, he would try to imagine her body tangled in swaying kelp at the bottom of the ocean where it had been flung. Bloated. Eaten by fish. But all he could conjure up was the intent look on her face when she rocked her son back and forth, singing a children’s rhyme in Bengali, Khoka jabe biye korte, shonge chhasho dhol, my little boy is going to be married, six hundred drummers. Years later, when he was an old man living in a home for seniors (his second wife dead, his daughters moved away to distant towns, his son not on speaking terms with him), he would continue to be dazzled by that brief unguarded joy in her face, would say to himself, again, how much she must have hated me to choose to give that up.
But he had no inkling of any of this yet. So he switched off the trash compactor with a satisfied click, the sense of a job well done and, after taking a shower (long and very hot, the way he liked it, the hard jets of water turning the skin of his chest a dull red), went to bed and fell immediately into a deep, dreamless sleep.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: My thanks to Claudine Ward, whose story “Fugue” inspired this one.
DOORS
IT ALL STARTED WHEN RAJ CAME TO LIVE WITH THEM.
But no, not really. There had been signs of trouble even earlier. Maybe that was why Preeti’s mother had kept warning her right up to the time of the marriage.
“It’ll never work, I tell you,” she had declared gloomily as she placed a neatly folded pile of shimmery dupattas in the suitcase Preeti would be taking back to Berkeley with her after the wedding. “Here you are, living in the U.S. since you were twelve. And Deepak—he’s straight out of India. Just because you took a few classes together at the university, and you liked how he talks, doesn’t mean that you can live with him.”
“Please, Ma!” Preeti paused halfway through emptying out her makeup drawer. “We’ve been over this a hundred times. Don’t you think it’s time to stop, considering the fact the wedding’s tomorrow?”
“It’s never too late to stop yourself from ruining your life,” her mother said. “What do you really know about how Indian men think? About what they expect from their women?”
“Now don’t start on that again. You and Dad have had a happy enough marriage the last twenty-four years, haven’t you?”
“Your father’s not like the others….”
“Nor is Deepak.”
“And besides, he’s mellowed over the years. You should have seen him when we first got married.”
“Well, I’m sure with all the training you’ve given me, I’ll be able to mellow Deepak in no time!”
“That’s your problem!” Preeti’s mother flared. “Making a joke of everything, thinking the world will always let you have your own way. I wish I had trained you better, like my mother did me, to be obedient and adjusting and forgiving. You’re going to need it.”
“Is this the same mother who was always at me to marry a nice Indian boy! The one who introduced me to all her friends’ sons whenever I came home from college!”
“They were all brought up here, like you.” Her mother refused to be charmed. “Not with a set of prehistoric values.”
“Mom! Deepak is the most enlightened man I know!” Preeti spoke lightly, trying to push down her rising anger because she knew her mother’s concern came from love.
“I want you to know you always have a home with us.” Preeti’s mother lowered the lid of the suitcase with a sigh, as though she were closing up a coffin.
“Enough of all this doom and gloom!” Preeti had given her mother a determined hug, though deep down she felt a twinge of fear at her ominous tone. “Let’s not argue anymore, OK? Deepak and I love each other. We’ll manage just fine.”
Deepak’s Indian friends had also been concerned when he’d met them at the International House Cafe to share the good news.
“Yaar, are you sure you’re doing the right thing?” one of them had asked, staring down at the wedding invitation Deepak had handed him. “She’s been here so long it’s almost like she was born in this country. And you know how these ‘American’ women are, always bossing you, always thinking about themselves. …”
“It’s no wonder we call them ABCDs—American-Born-Confused-Desis,” quipped another friend as he took a swallow of beer.
“Preeti’s different!” Deepak said angrily. “You know that—you’ve all met her many times. She’s smart and serious and considerate….”
“Me,” said a third young man, adjusting his spectacles, “I’d go for an arranged marriage from back home any day, a pretty young girl from my parents’ village, not too educated, brought up to treat a man right and not talk back….”
“I can’t believe you said that!” Deepak stood up so abruptly that his chair fell over with a crash. “Women aren’t dolls or slaves. I want Preeti to make her own decisions. I’m proud that she’s able
to.”
“Calm down, Deepak-bhai, we’re only trying to help! We don’t want you to end up with a broken marriage a few years down the road …” someone protested.
“Our marriage isn’t going to break up. It’s going to be stronger than any traditional marriage because it’s based on mutual respect,” Deepak had flung over his shoulder as he walked out of the cafe.
On the whole it seemed that Preeti and Deepak had been right. They had lived together amicably for the last three years, at first in a tiny student apartment in Berkeley and then, after Deepak got a job with a computer firm, in a condominium in Milpitas. Preeti, who was still working on her dissertation, hadn’t been too enthusiastic about moving to the suburbs, but she’d given in when Deepak pointed out how difficult his commute had become. And it was true, like he said, that she only had to come to campus a couple times a week to teach. In return he left all the decorating to her, letting her fill the rooms with secondhand shelves crammed with books, comfortable old couches and cushions piled on the floor, a worn Persian rug and multicolored wall hangings woven by a women’s art co-op to which her friend Cathy belonged. He himself would have preferred to buy, on the Sears Home Improvement Plan, a brand-new sofa set (complete with shiny oak-finish end tables) and curtains that matched the bedspreads, but he figured that the house was her domain.
When finally, having settled in, they gave a housewarming party, all their friends had to admit that Deepak and Preeti had a fine marriage.
“Did you try some of those delicious gulabjamuns she fixed?” said one young man to another as they left. “Deepak sure lucked out, didn’t he?”
“Yes, and did you hear how she got the Student of the Year award in her department? Pretty soon she’ll land a cushy teaching job and start bringing in a fat paycheck as well!” replied the other, sighing enviously.