“My dad cheated on my mother,” I say. “Still, the day he was leaving, she fell at his feet and begged him not to go.”
“Don’t be too hard on her.”
“She asked me to beg him, too. But I wouldn’t. Later she said, If only you’d done what I told you, he might have stayed.”
Mrs. Mehta sighs. “People get addicted to love. Or just to having someone around. So many times Mr. Mehta gave me grief. I had to get his permission for every little thing: read a book, go to the cinema, even phone my parents. A lot of times he’d say no just because he could. Yet when he died, I wept and wept. I didn’t know what to do with myself.”
“Will you come with me tomorrow to pick up my things?” I ask.
“Yes. But where will you go?”
“Don’t know. Maybe Blanca will let me crash at her place for a while.”
“You could come with me,” she says, “when I return to India. I still have a flat there.”
India! The word surges inside me like a wave.
I hug the raccoon. In the salt breeze, it smells damp and raw, the way it was meant to. Soon it’ll be bobbing on the ocean with its small, fierce smile. The phone has fallen silent. Ebb and flow, ebb and flow, our lives. Is that why we’re fascinated by the steadfastness of stars?
The water reaches my calves. I begin the story of the Pleiades, women transformed into birds so swift and bright that no man could snare them.
Durga Sweets
1995: Ash
The phone call about Sabitri came very early in the morning, but that was not a problem because Bipin Bihari Ghatak was up already. In fact, he had been up for some time. In recent years, after he had turned fifty-five, sleep had become a fickle mistress. And he was not the kind of man to lie in bed wishing for its return once it had abandoned him. He had finished brushing his teeth with a neem stick, chewing on its fibrous end, relishing the cleanly bitter taste it left in his mouth. Not many people used the sticks nowadays. He had to go all the way to Taltola Bazaar to get his week’s supply, but he didn’t mind. Ever since he had quit his job as manager of Durga Sweets, he didn’t have much to do.
Bipin Bihari had finished his bath, too, shivering a little because, being by necessity frugal and by nature spartan, he preferred not to heat his bathwater. Besides, the ancient heater in his one-room flat was moody. When it refused to cooperate, he had to heat water in the rice pot and ferry it from stove top to bathroom. He didn’t want to become dependent on such a troublesome habit.
On the small table where he both ate and worked, he had moved aside a stack of forms (intermittently, he took on auditing jobs) and set out his cup and saucer. He had measured from a monogrammed wood box a spoonful of the premium Darjeeling tea that was his one indulgence, and poured boiling water over it. But this morning the tea would go to waste, because on the other end of the line was Sabitri’s maid Rekha, calling from the village, and crying so hard that twice he had to ask her to calm down and repeat herself.
Once he grasped what had occurred, Bipin Bihari only took the time to pull a worn kurta over his undershirt and to grab, from its hiding place under his mattress, the plastic bag in which he kept his emergency money. He thrust it into his satchel, hurried down the narrow, ill-lit stairs to the street, and hailed (for the first time in years) a taxi, though he knew it was going to be dreadfully expensive because Howrah Station was at the other end of Kolkata. He leaned forward and grasped the resin seat-back and asked the driver to kindly hurry, it was a matter of life and death. The man raised an eyebrow at that, but Bipin Bihari, who was not prone to exaggeration, was merely telling the truth.
At Howrah, he bought a ticket to Porabazar, the nearest station to Sabitri’s village, ran to the platform, and managed to wrestle his way onto the crowded train as it was pulling out. He must have looked quite ill, because a young man got up from his seat, which young people never did nowadays, and said, “Here, Dadu, you had better sit down.” At any other time, being addressed as a grandfather would have stung, for Bipin Bihari took pride in keeping himself fit, walking for an hour each evening around the park near his flat. But today he lowered himself with heavy thankfulness onto the wood bench and wiped the sweat from his face with the edge of his dhoti because in his rush he had forgotten his handkerchief. His heart was beating too fast, an erratic, dismayed drumroll. How could this have happened? Only last week he had phoned Sabitri to check up on her, and she had laughed and called him a worrywart and said she was doing fine.
On the train, a vendor was selling tea and biscuits. Bipin Bihari bought a cup, along with two small packets of Parle biscuits. He made himself drink the tea, even though it tasted appalling (what had the man used to sweeten the brew?), and eat the biscuits, which were stale and crumbly. If his blood sugar dropped, he would be of no use to Sabitri. He focused on the rhythm of the train, which was at once jerky and soothing, to keep from imagining what he might find when he reached the other end. It was a long journey; in between, he dozed and thought he was back at Durga Sweets, sitting at his desk in that windowless back room lit by a bulb hanging from its wire, sweating because it was always too hot there. Sabitri leaned over his desk, looking at the slogan he had just come up with: We Make the World a Sweeter Place. Her hair, its silky hibiscus smell, fell tangled onto his neck. “It’s perfect!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands. That was when he knew it was a dream. Sabitri would never have come to work without her hair tied back in a bun; she would never have clapped with such teenagerish abandon.
Awake, he felt bereft. Then something Rekha had mentioned on the phone swam back into his mind. Ma said that if anything happened to her, I was to call you first, no one else.
But of course, Bipin Bihari thought as he waited for station after station to pass, for the sooty factories of suburban towns to give way to young paddy fields so brilliantly green they hurt the eye. For as long back as he could remember, wasn’t he the one Sabitri had turned to, in good times and bad? In the midst of his anxiety, the thought made him smile.
Walking into the small house that Sabitri had built after retirement on the plot where her parents’ mud hut had once stood, Bipin Bihari knew he was too late. Not because the front doors were carelessly ajar on their hinges. (He closed them behind him; Sabitri would not have wanted flies in her home.) Not because there was a gaggle of servant women, Rekha in their center, gathered in the inner courtyard, rocking back and forth, keening. (He instructed them to control themselves; Sabitri detested histrionics.) Not even because of the body (it was not Sabitri; it would never be her), laid out on a mattress on the floor, covered with a white sheet. He knew it because his heart had not stuttered and stumbled the way it always did when he was about to see her. His heart, now reduced to a mere muscle, resigned for the rest of Bipin Bihari’s life to the task of stolid pumping.
Fortunately, there was no time to dwell on such things. He sent for the doctor, ascertained the cause of death (failure of the heart), and set in motion the process for getting a death certificate. He phoned the village cremation grounds and asked them to make the necessary arrangements. He told Rekha to inform Sabitri’s friends of the funeral (but Sabitri had kept mostly to herself, so there were not many). Searching guiltily through drawers, he managed to locate Sabitri’s address book and phoned her daughter in America. He made several calls, each time leaving a detailed message, trying not to think of the bill, and who would take care of it. But Bela did not pick up. In this heat, the body could not be kept in the house any longer. Already the room was filling with a sickly sweet stench. Finally, Bipin Bihari had to tell the cremation society folks to load the body into the back of their lorry and take it away.
Sabitri’s village was small and old-fashioned, and so were the cremation grounds. Unlike in the electric crematoriums in Kolkata, here the body would be burned on a funeral pyre in the open air; then Sabitri’s ashes would be scattered in the sluggish brown river that ran by the cremation grounds. A deep tiredness overtook Bipin Bihari as he climbed d
own from the back of the lorry where he had accompanied the body. His bones ached, and the fillings in his teeth seemed to vibrate, giving him a headache. Still, he stood next to the pyre to make sure that the workers placed on it the right amount of sandalwood (for which he had paid extra) and that the corpse, draped in Sabitri’s best sari and covered with garlands, its face now uncovered so that the spirit might leave more easily, was handled gently.
When the priest asked who would light the funeral fire, since Sabitri had no blood kin in the village, he stepped forward. He had thought he could do it, touch the flaming brand to the body, but when he looked into that face, rigid and bereft of its humanness, his hands shook so much that the priest had to help him. He was an old man; it had been a long day; the few neighbors gathered around the pyre thought nothing of it.
By the time he got back to the house, it was dark. He would have to stay over and return to Kolkata in the morning. There was only one bed in the house. Sabitri’s. Rekha had made it up for him to sleep in, but he told her it would be disrespectful to the dead.
“Ma would not have minded,” Rekha said, cocking her head stubbornly. But he could be just as stubborn, so finally Rekha laid out a mat and bedsheets for him on the floor of the sitting room. He bathed and ate the food that she forced upon him: overcooked rice and dal that, in her distraction, she had salted twice. Before he retired for the night, he reassured her that Ma had made certain she would be taken care of. He knew this to be true because Sabitri—a planner, like him—had years ago shown him a copy of her will, of which he was to be the executor. Finally, he asked Rekha if she knew what had brought on the heart attack. Had Sabitri had been ill?
“Ma was just fine,” Rekha said, “and happy, too, until Bela Didi called.” Her face twisted and Bipin Bihari could see that she (like him) had never forgiven Sabitri’s daughter for the grief she had caused Sabitri when she eloped all those years ago. For a moment he gave in to his resentment of Bela, remembering with dull anger how he had tried several times to befriend the girl as she was growing up. But she had been suspicious and thorny, treating him as though he had an ulterior motive.
“Bela Didi was crying loudly—even I could hear it. That one, it was problem after problem with her. She never cared how much she upset Ma with her news. After she hung up, Ma got real quiet. So many times I asked, but she refused to eat dinner. In the night, she started writing something. A letter, I think. She wouldn’t go to bed. I told her she must lie down, her pressure would go high otherwise. She shouted at me to leave her alone. To go to sleep. But I shouldn’t have listened to her.” She dissolved into tears again.
Bipin Bihari waited until Rekha was done sobbing. Then he asked where the letter was. She led him to the table where Sabitri had been sitting. He picked up one of the sheets of notepaper that lay on it. It struck him that this was the last thing Sabitri’s hands had touched. He wanted to raise it to his lips, but Rekha was watching. The desire to know Sabitri’s final thoughts swept through him like fire. Dearest Granddaughter Tara, he read.
But no, he could not invade her privacy this way, now that she was powerless to stop him. He gathered all the sheets, even the ones thrown on the floor. He smoothed them out and put them carefully in his bag. Here was an envelope, addressed in Sabitri’s handwriting, which he knew so well, to Bela’s daughter at her university. He took that, too.
Upon his return to Kolkata, Bipin Bihari would mail the entire packet to Sabitri’s granddaughter. He would put in his own address and a phone number, in case someone called him from America, wanting details. He would wait a long time, hoping for that phone call. He wanted Sabitri’s family to know that she had spent her last hours thinking of them, trying to communicate something so crucial and difficult that it had caused her death. With a fierceness that was rare for him, he wanted them—especially Bela, who had so summarily abandoned her mother—to feel guilty. But no one ever contacted him. Had the letter even reached Tara? There wasn’t any way for him to find out.
After the cremation, the pyre workers had scooped up Sabitri’s ashes in an earthenware pot and handed them to Bipin Bihari. There was an old motorboat waiting at a makeshift dock. It would take him to the middle of the river so that he could scatter the ashes. Three other men with the same mission were in the boat already. This annoyed Bipin Bihari, who had hoped to perform his task privately, but there was nothing to be done. The boat chugged ahead in jerky spurts; something was wrong with the engine. From the water, looking back at the cremation grounds, he noticed for the first time vultures, circling, swooping down once in a while like black arrows, more graceful than he would have ever believed birds of prey could be.
The boatman slowed the launch and told them it was time. One of the men—a young fellow with a shaved head, which indicated the death of a parent—began to weep, not caring who watched. There was something infectious about his unselfconscious grief; Bipin Bihari found himself close to tears. But Sabitri had hated displays of emotion, so he gazed into the distance with a stern expression.
They emptied the ashes overboard and set the containers afloat. The boat began its journey back to the shore. Bipin Bihari kept his eyes on the pot that he had been holding. It seemed important, somehow, to be able to distinguish it from the others. But his eyes were no longer as sharp as they had been; soon he could not see any pots at all.
“Was it your wife?” one of the men in the boat asked.
Bipin Bihari wanted to say yes, to claim Sabitri in death the way he had never been able to in life. But he was not a liar. It would have been accurate to have replied that she was his employer, but that, too, was far from the truth between them. Finally he said, “She was my friend.”
1991: Aerogram
“You can’t do this!” Bipin Bihari exclaimed, leaning over Sabitri’s desk. They were in the back office at Durga Sweets, which over the years seemed more of a home to him than his one-room flat. It was late evening. The cooks had left, and the salespeople, too, so he allowed himself to raise his voice. He held up the typed sheets Sabitri had given him and shook them. “It would be the worst mistake. I won’t let you do it.”
“And how do you propose to stop me?” Sabitri asked, her tone expressing a mild interest.
He could feel the rage pressing into his brain like an aneurysm. She was the only person who could make him feel this way. He wanted to shake the stubbornness out of her. “Very well. I can’t stop you. But don’t you see what a terrible mistake it would be? To sell the business now, when it’s the most profitable it has ever been? After we got that excellent write-up in the Telegraph that’s bound to bring us a new, younger crowd?”
She had on her obstinate face, the lower lip jutting out slightly. He tried a different tack.
“What’s going to happen to all your faithful employees, who stood by you through the hard times? Are you willing to turn them out on the street? People like Balaram and Shirish Kaka, who are too old to look for other jobs—” And what he couldn’t say: What will happen to me, without you?
“Clearly you were too impatient to read through the contract, Bipin Babu,” she said, addressing him in the formal manner, employer to employee, the way she did when he had managed to get beneath her skin. “Page four: The first term of sale is that everyone will be kept on.”
How well she knew him. It was true. He hadn’t read past the first page of the document. He’d been too upset. But concern for the workers—or even for himself—had been only a small part of it. Mostly, he had been afraid for her. “What about you? What will you do if you sell this place?”
“I’ll retire to my parents’ village.”
“But you hate the village. How many times have you told me about those petty-minded people, their gossip, their backbiting. . . . And Durga Sweets is your life—”
“There’s no longer a reason for me to hold on to it,” she said flatly.
Her words were like a punch to his chest. What did she mean by it? Durga Sweets, or her life?
“Why do you say that?” His voice was small and damp.
In response she slid an aerogram toward him. From the red and blue border he knew it was from America, from Bela. He had tried hard to be fond of Bela, had ferried her back and forth from school when she was young, had even cleared his manager’s desk for her so she could do her homework at Durga Sweets, close to her mother. But the girl had been sullen and thankless.
Looking at the aerogram now, he felt a constriction in his gut. A letter from Bela—at least the ones that Sabitri showed him—meant trouble. He didn’t want to read it. But Sabitri was waiting, and he knew that he was the only person with whom she could share these letters.
Dear Mother, I’m very sorry to tell you that I’m canceling my trip to India. I know you were really looking forward to it, and to seeing Tara for the first time, and so was I. But Sanjay absolutely refuses to let us go. Yesterday we had a huge fight over it. He claims that it’s not safe. He’s afraid that since he and I both left India with documents that weren’t exactly legal, I might be detained, and Tara along with me. He’s also afraid that certain parties might find out that we’re coming and harm us, since he’d been on their hit list before he escaped. I’m not sure if any of this is true, but since he feels so strongly, I’ve decided not to argue any more about it, at least for now. It’s the only thing he asks of me, and he’s such a good husband, always watching out for whatever I need. Most of all, he’s the best father to Tara. Helps her with schoolwork. Coaches her basketball team though he really doesn’t have the time. She adores him. And you know how sensitive she is—fights between him and me always make her sick. After our argument yesterday, she started throwing up. . . .