Vine of Desire

  William Lindley

  Fifteen

  Sudha

  Anju is restless tonight. Her sleep is a cave filled with murky water, lit by the phosphorescent fins of alien fauna. She swims around it in circles, she dips her face in the water and lets the seaweed caress her features. She raises her face to snatch a breath of uncertain, brackish air. Sometimes she opens her eyes onto her bedroom and sees nothing. Sometimes she shuts them quickly as though she would rather not see what is there.

  Eleven P.M. Midnight. One A.M. She leaves the bed and goes to the living room. She removes from her backpack the notebook with the letters to her father. The light from the lamp falls on them damply, as though the room were filled with fog, or tears. Anju reads with concentration, moving her lips silently. She loves the faithfulness of words. How, once you’ve held them in your mouth, they become yours.

  She knows this also: there may come a time when theirs will be the only loyalty she can count on.

  Dear Father,

  Some nights, lying down to sleep, I feel I am losing my body. Where are my feet, my hands, my face? Dark erases the line of my cheek and draws in another’s. Where is the shape of my life? My knees float away into the blackness of the bedroom. The hairs on my head rise into the sky in separate strands. You must not think this frightens me. I am exhilarated by the regrouping of my cells. They tell me I can be someone else—anyone I want. If only I could decide who.

  Dear Father,

  Today when I walked out of the classroom a sudden gust of wind tossed the smell of wild ginger at me—though of course there is no wild ginger growing anywhere on campus. Suddenly I understood why you left us. The allure of newness. It tugs at me like time tugs at the snake’s skin, persuading him to shrug it off. But what if, shrugging off my old life, I find I am not a snake but an onion instead? Peel after peel after peel, and then: nothing.

  Father,

  Sometimes, reading a new book, I grow so excited I forget to breathe. There’s so much to learn, and already I’ve lost so much time. Each day new worlds glimmer around me. I am like a nearsighted person wearing her first glasses. Apartheid. Midnight’s Children. The Internet. Aung San Suu Kyi. Then I think, what good is all this information? What will it change in my life? In my husband’s face?

  Here is a fact: I am of no use to my household. If I disappeared tomorrow, Sudha would grieve, Dayita would look for me behind curtains and doors, wondering if this were some long game of hide-and-seek. Sunil would call the police. But soon they would draw together, the way flesh pulls itself close to heal a wound. Not even a scar would remain.

  There is a sound at the bedroom door. Anju does not startle. She does not whisk the notebook out of sight. Does she want, then, to be discovered? Does she want Sunil to see the questions she has written for her father? Does she wish him to answer them?

  “Anju! What are you doing!” says Sunil in a drowsy voice. Anju opens her mouth to speak, then realizes that he doesn’t want a reply. Already he’s turning away. “Come to bed,” he says. “You’ll be dead tired tomorrow.”

  Anju puts away her books. In bed, slipping into the flooded cave of sleep, she begins to make a list. It is a list of things to take with her when she disappears.

  Sudha, too, has been writing. The letter sits on her bedside table now, an oblong of ghostly white in the darkened room.

  Ashok,

  I apologize for not answering your letters. Writing takes a lot of strength, and I didn’t—don’t—have any to spare.

  When I came away from India, I told you not to wait for me. I’m saying it again. I don’t know when I’ll return, if at all. I’m discovering that my divorce was like a surgeon’s scalpel. It cut the past out of my flesh, the good with the bad. Now I must find other things to live for.

  I left you twice—the first time to marry, the second time to come to America. I don’t want there to be a third time.

  It’s best this way. Remember the old tales about the Vish Kanyas? Women bred on poison, whose kisses brought destruction wherever they went? I think I’m one of them.

  When I seal this envelope, I’m going to forget you.

  You must do the same. Believe me, you’ll be happier for it.

  “Don’t tell me this is what you’re going to wear!” Anju’s voice rises in disbelief.

  “I won’t tell you, then,” Sudha smiles. She’s dressed in one of Anju’s old jeans and a plain white T-shirt. Her hair is tied back in a no-nonsense ponytail. Her scrubbed, girl-next-door face is beautiful in a whole new way, accentuating the smoky allure of her eyes.

  Anju doesn’t think so. “You look like the ugly duckling,” she snaps.

  “We’ll have to see if my frog prince recognizes me, then.”

  Anju refuses to be amused. “You’ve got your fairy tales mixed up. At least put on some makeup. A pair of earrings.”

  Sudha shakes her head. “I don’t want—” she starts, then breaks off as Sunil enters the room. The scowl on his face gives way to a more pleasant look as he stares at the plainness of her getup. “How about I make breakfast today?” he says after a moment.

  “Are my ears working right?” Anju asks. “Did I hear the man say he’ll cook for us?”

  “Anju!” Sudha says.

  “It’s just that I never knew he could,” Anju says.

  “She always did have a conveniently short memory.”

  “Stop it, you two!” Sudha says, laughing. She helps Sunil find flour and eggs, a nonstick pan. He turns out surprisingly good Indian pancakes, crisp and golden, studded with onions and green chilies and mustard seed, to be eaten with ginger pickle. For Dayita he mixes molasses into the batter and makes small sweet ones shaped like jellyfish. When she clears her plate and clamors for more, he smiles. It’s the kind of smile only Dayita can pull out of him, delighted and boyish.

  When Lalit rings the doorbell, Sunil swings the door open in a magnanimous arc and invites him to join them. If Lalit is taken aback by this sudden friendliness, his expression doesn’t give it away. It must be part of the training they give them in med school.

  Hellos all around the table. A cheery one from Lalit, a subdued one from Sudha, an exuberant one from Anju, accompanied by loud fork-banging from an excited Dayita. Lalit pulls up a chair close to Sudha.

  “How’s it going?” The way he cocks his head, like an intelligent bird, and waits for her answer transforms the question into something deeper. Anju clears her throat teasingly. Sudha blushes and mumbles a brief reply. At the stove Sunil’s grin has turned Machiavellian. He sprinkles extra chilies onto the pancake he’s making for Lalit.

  “Looks great!” Lalit says, and takes an enthusiastic bite.

  “Hope it isn’t too spicy for you,” Sunil says sweetly.

  “No, no, it’s fine,” Lalit says. He dabs surreptitiously at his forehead, where sweat has broken out.

  “Here, have some orange juice,” Anju says.

  “Personally, I like mine spicier,” Sunil says.

  Anju, who knows he has a weak stomach, gives him a look. “You don’t have to eat all those chilies, Lalit. Just pick them out. Sudha, get him another glass of juice.”

  Lalit, who is coughing, gives her a grateful glance. But soon he’s recovered enough to tell them a newlyweds joke. “So the wife’s serving him his first meal. She says, This is one of the two things I cook really well, dear: chicken curry and rice pudding. And he replies, It’s lovely, darling. Which one is it, by the way?”

  Sunil interrupts the laughter. “Since you like jokes so much, here’s one. Did you hear about the doctor whose fiancée jilted him? Not only did he take back the diamond ring he gave her, he charged her for twenty-four house calls.”

  There’s a moment of utter silence. Then Lalit chuckles. He’s amused, and not just at the joke. “I’ll have to remember that one,” he says and drains his glass of juice.

  They’re all laughing now. A sliver of sunshine falls across the dining table. Sunil holds Dayita aloft like a sign. “Say
, Have a nice day, Mother,” he instructs. “Say, Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  “Bring her back before dark,” Anju says. “She turns into a pumpkin when the sun goes down.”

  Everyone laughs again. They are one happy family.

  They’re eating in the gardens of the Palace of Fine Arts, festive red-and-white cartons of Chinese takeout surrounding them. Sudha confesses it’s her first time with chopsticks.

  “It’s simple,” says Lalit. “Just watch me.”

  He picks up a peanut from the kung pao chicken with a grand flourish of his sticks, and loses it just before it reaches his mouth.

  Sudha bursts out laughing, dropping her own precariously held piece of chicken in the process. “Stop! I think I just sprained my laugh muscles!”

  “Madam, you must not be exercising them regularly,” Lalit says with severity. “As your doctor, I prescribe the following: ten giggles, twenty snickers, and thirty chuckles daily.”

  “Please! No more! You’ll be the death of me! Haven’t you heard what they say about too much laughter?”

  “Wow, another arcane Indian maxim! Wait, let me get out my notebook. …”

  This is what Sudha doesn’t know:

  The day she found out that Sudha’s mother-in-law was demanding she have an abortion, Anju was so upset that she did something that was rare for her: she called Sunil at work. When she told him the news, he was oddly silent. But she was too agitated to notice.

  “You know how back in India people believe that each person’s allotted a certain amount of good fortune when they’re born?” she asked. “They say that’s why people born with too much beauty have problems with other things in their lives—they’ve used up their luck. Do you think there’s any truth to it? Sunil? Are you there?”

  “I don’t know,” Sunil said finally. “I’m not even sure I know what’s good luck and what isn’t. Something happens, you think it’s wonderful. A couple years later you can’t stand it.”

  “I hate it when you make these vague philosophical statements,” Anju said impatiently. “How can anyone be confused about what’s good luck and what’s bad? My being pregnant, for example. It’s the luckiest thing that’s ever happened to us.”

  “You’re right,” Sunil said. He drew in his breath as though about to ask her about something else—the possibility of Sudha’s divorce, perhaps—whether it would be indicative of misfortune or its opposite. But she’d already moved on.

  “It’s a silly belief, anyway, about you having only so much luck in your life. When we were growing up, Aunt N. used to tell us, Joto hasi toto kanna—How much you laugh today, that’s how much you’ll cry tomorrow. I hated that saying, I still do. And I refuse to believe it.”

  “That’s smart,” Sunil said. His voice sounded tinny and small and sad, as though he envied his wife her certainty.

  Behind them, the fluted towers rise yellow-brown, color of roasted turmeric. Around them, groups of lovers in various combinations of race and gender are scattered on the grass, casual as dandelions. It is the year of cosmic collisions, when fragments of a comet named Shoemaker-Levy 9 will crash into Jupiter, producing gigantic fireballs. But here the grass is warm in the afternoon sun, and damp, as though it has been recently watered.

  “American grass smells different,” Sudha says.

  “In what way?”

  Sudha wrinkles her forehead, trying to find the words.

  “It smells more male—you know, tough and fertilizer-fortified.”

  “Fascinating! I envision a whole new line of men’s toiletries—For that tough, fertilizer-fortified look, try—”

  She ignores the interruption. “If you stop taking care of it, it’ll die off right away. Indian grass looks more delicate—that startling new-green color—and yet it survives, in spite of droughts and cows and all the weeds that try to choke it.”

  “Like women?” Lalit raises an eyebrow. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  Sudha wants to come back with something flippant, but she finds herself saying, “You wanted to know how I grew up. Well, all my life, I lived with the concept of duty—how a woman should behave toward her parents, her husband, her in-laws, her children. Don’t mistake me—I didn’t think of it as a burden. It gave me the boundaries I needed, a wall of moral safety behind which to live. Duty took the place of love—it was love. Without it, I believed, society would fall apart.”

  Lalit is quiet now, waiting.

  “But what happens when others don’t fulfill their duty toward you?” Her eyes flash. Her fingers are tightly intertwined. “Your husband, for example, who’d promised to always protect you—and, by extension, your children. That’s when I walked out of my marriage. I don’t think you can even imagine what that means in an orthodox family in India. My own mother kept telling me I should go back to him, go through with the abortion. The first few months, I felt so guilty and frightened and ashamed, I thought I would die. But I survived.”

  Lalit’s eyes are on her face, intent and thoughtful. He’s struggling to put together the pieces of the life she’s flung at him. To understand her story, which is so different from his.

  “I survived, but you know what happened? I let go of one duty, one relationship—and found that all the others were attached to it like the knotted handkerchiefs a magician pulls from his hat. I felt them rush through my fingers until I was left holding nothing. Nothing—and no one—to stop me from doing whatever I wanted, whether it was good or evil.”

  Lalit touches her arm lightly. Is he wondering why she’s telling him this, what it means for the two of them? But maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe he’s like the stranger on a train to whom you open your heart because you know you’ll get down after a couple of stations.

  On the other side of the water, where black-and-white swans glide with lazy elegance, a group of people have appeared. It’s a party, festive with loud Latino music and pungent food smells: cumin, chilies, cilantro. A few teenagers begin to salsa. A young woman in a long white gauzy dress holds a lace fan and poses for a photograph with an old lady, who is perhaps her grandmother.

  “It scares me,” Sudha says. Two men are lying on the grass nearby, looking up at the sky. One of them holds the other’s hand to his chest as he talks. A faint color stains Sudha’s cheeks as she glances at them. “Especially since I came here. Everywhere I turn in America, they say, Live for yourself.”

  “Not everyone here is like you think.” He speaks with some heat.

  “Live for yourself,” Sudha continues, as though she hadn’t heard him. “I’m not sure what it means. I’m not sure I know how to do it and still be a good person. And I want to, you know. I still want to be a good person, even if I’ve failed at being a good wife. There’s a terrible pull to the idea of living for myself, and a terrible emptiness. I feel like a flyaway helium balloon—all the people I know are on the ground somewhere, but so far away and small, they hardly matter. Yet I know I can’t go back to the old way, living for others.”

  “Why do you have to choose one or the other?” He’s sitting up now, his fingers tearing at the grass. “Can’t you find a compromise?”

  “I don’t know how to,” Sudha says simply. “Do you? Or do you live for yourself, too?”

  “That’s a tough question,” Lalit says. “It’ll take me some time to even begin to answer it.” He throws the remains of their meal into a garbage can and holds out his hand to help Sudha up. “Remember, I promised to get you home before dark so that you don’t have to live out the rest of your life in a pumpkin patch.”

  Sudha gives his hand a sudden yank, making him fall to his knees beside her.

  “Whoa! What did they put in that kung pao—” But he breaks off at the impassioned look on her face.

  “I don’t care what you promised,” she says, her breath coming fast. “You have to talk to me. I’m going crazy because I have no one to talk to—not even Anju, whom I loved more than I loved anyone else; even my daughter, even m
yself. But not anymore …”

  Lalit looks at his hand, which she’s still grasping, her nails pressing into the side of his palm.

  “We’ll talk as long as you want,” he says quietly. “Let’s get to the car, though, where we’ll have more privacy.”

  To get to the car they have to pass by the Hispanic family, who smile and call out “Hola!” A man rises from a table to offer them a plate of pastries. “My daughter’s fifteenth birthday!” he says. “Have some dulce—wish her happiness!”

  Sudha and Lalit share a flaky, sugared pastry and wave at the girl, who, flushed with excitement, is leading a line dance of some kind. The low sun forms a red halo behind her head. She throws them a kiss. “Join us!” some people shout.

  “They were so friendly,” Sudha says as she gets into the car. She frowns a suspicious frown. “They don’t even know us. Why were they so friendly?”

  “Does there have to be a reason?” Lalit asks. Then he adds, “There’s a lot about America that’s unexpected. Don’t be in too much of a hurry to make up your mind about things. Or people.”

  “Like you?” She’s smiling a little now.

  “On the contrary—I hope you’ve already made up your mind that I’m the most debonair and delightful man you’ve ever met.”

  “Absolutely. Now, back to the other question I asked.”

  “Didn’t they ever teach you that flattery will get you nowhere?” Lalit says. “Well, they were wrong.”

  By the time he finishes talking, it’s long past dusk. The swans have disappeared, and the quinceañera and her court. A wind comes up, turning the lights shining on the water into a thousand broken glimmerings. His car, a comfortably shabby Honda in which Sudha feels at home, is the only car left on the edge of the Palace of Fine Arts, to which darkness has given a surreal, ruined aspect.

  “God!” he says. “It’s really late.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Your family will be worrying. You’d better call them.”