Vine of Desire

  She hesitates at the door. Should she wake Dayita? Is it a good idea to leave her in an unfamiliar room, even if she is walled in with pillows and covered with her favorite blanket? But it’s getting late, she must make the old man’s breakfast, he hasn’t eaten in days. With a glance of misgiving, she shuts the bathroom door tight. There was a story the other night on TV about an accident, a child who drowned in a toilet. From the corridor she raises her hand toward the sleeping girl—a gesture of blessing or farewell, or a command to stay put.

  Sunil stands at the living room window watching the sunrise, something he has not done in years. It is a beautiful morning, clear and cloudless pink, the ubiquitous smog washed away by last night’s downpour. Sunil faces it grim and bleary-eyed. Ready or not, his new life is upon him (what else can we call this day, now that his old life lies in shambles?), and he must live it.

  The golden morning light has just started moving across the carpet. The same carpet where yesterday…. Yester-day. Each syllable strikes him like a branding iron. He turns on his heel—to hell with the sunrise—to make himself a cup of tea. Before Sudha took over the tea-making duties, he used to be good at it. When Anju was pregnant, he would make her masala cha, opening the pods of cardamom carefully over the rich brown liquid as it came to a boil, carrying it to her in bed. Does he remember the dry rub of the fragrant seeds against the whorls of his fingertips? Better if he doesn’t. Already I’m learning that forgetting is essential to survival.

  Today he doesn’t heat the water long enough. He puts in the milk too soon. He can’t find the Sweet ’N Low and decides to do without. He takes a sip of the watery brew, which must taste awful, but his expression doesn’t change. Is this stoicism or preoccupation? He pauses in front of the TV and hefts the remote, considering. Even this early, in this country obsessed with the ways in which violence and celebrity intersect, there are channels discussing O. J.’s chances of acquittal. But today Sunil turns away from them into the crisis of his own life. He presses his hands to his temples with a grimace. Who can acquit him? Not even himself.

  “Damn,” says Sunil as he pours his tea into the sink and watches the brown liquid drain away. “Damn.” It’s an injured sound, as though something has ripped inside him. He carries a chair from the dining area over to Sudha’s room, where Anju chose to spend last night. The crib looms in a corner like the stripped carcass of some beast. He winces away from it as he sits down and waits for Anju to wake.

  Last evening he had been the first to come home. He had opened the door into the dark room and taken a step backward, blinded by silence. He had known, then. Still, he read the letters, both of them, over and over. He crushed them in his fingers, smoothed them out, crushed them again. Some men would have smashed their fists into things. Some men would have wept. Sunil did neither. Was that his weakness or his strength? He opened a window, let the rain come in. His chest was wet from it by the time Anju returned.

  Anju sleeps on her stomach, her face buried in Sudha’s pillow as though she were trying to inhale a memory. Her arms are spread out stiffly, gesture of embrace or crucifixion. Her fists clutch the sides of the mattress. Her hair, fallen to one side of her neck, exposes knobs of vertebrae that look intensely breakable. Although she stopped crying some time ago, her breath still comes out in ragged wisps.

  Even before she read the letter last night, she said, “Where is she? What did you do to her? What did you do?” Her pupils were pinpricks of distrust. She went for him with everything she had—fists, knees, words. He didn’t try to stop her. He let scratches bloom their trail of blood along his cheek. Did he believe this would even out things between them? “I should have known!” she said. She kicked his shin as hard as she could with the point of her shoe. She wanted him to hurt. To break apart like a tree trunk with a rotten core. You, you, you.

  Where can a marriage travel after that?

  The kitchen in the glass house is a chiaroscuro of rectangles, light and airy shade. Sunshine pools on blond wood countertops like honey, drawing Sudha forward. Then she stops. In the foyer, voices. The female one quivers like the tip of a weapon. The man’s is placating and muffled, an underwater sound.

  Is this to be her role always, eavesdropper and witness to spousal strife?

  She: I can’t take it any longer, Tree. Last night was the worst. He hates me, I know it—he aimed that spaghetti bowl right at me.

  He: But, Myra, he doesn’t hate you. He’s just mad at life for what it’s done to him.

  She: Let him throw his spaghetti bowl at life, then. It took me almost a half hour to clean up, even with the new girl’s help. Some of those stains won’t ever come off the carpet.

  He: (Silence)

  She: Go ahead and say it, how crass and shallow of me to worry about carpets—even though it is a horrendously expensive Persian one—when your father is bedridden and suffering. Well, I am crass and shallow. He’s worn me down to my crass and shallow core.

  He: I’m not blaming you. I understand how you must feel—

  She: No, you don’t. You can’t. You’re too busy feeling guilty because you left him behind in India and never went back. And secretly you blame me for it—the crass and shallow American who lured you into staying here.

  He: You just want a big, all-out fight, don’t you?

  She: (Silence)

  He: We’re all going through a hard time, Myra. We have to help each other, and keep in mind that this is a temporary situation.

  She: It would be easier to keep the temporariness of the situation in mind if I weren’t down on my knees every evening cleaning up the mess your father makes—while you’re working on your top-secret project in the lab.

  He: (Silence)

  She: I’d feel more sympathetic if he were sick and couldn’t help it. But he’ll purposely do something terrible and look at me with malice gleaming in his eyes. Why, even the new girl could see it.

  He: Well, now that she’s here, she’ll take care of him—

  She: If she lasts. You should have seen her face when he threw that bowl. And the names he called us! And starving himself like this—it’s just a way for him to get our attention and control us—

  He: Maybe he’ll get along with her once he gets to know her. From what you say, she seems nice—

  She: I’m not counting on anything. Except the fact that if this one can’t handle him, either he’s out of here, or I am.

  The door slams. A pause, then footsteps moving resignedly toward the kitchen. Sudha tries to compose her face into an appropriate expression. But what is appropriate when one has stumbled upon such a nakedness of words, no less shameful in its way than the nakedness of flesh?

  The stubble on Sunil’s lean jawbone gives him an air of urgency, like a man on the run. But his fingers, laced in his lap, are square-tipped and patient. He’s used up a lifetime of emotion in the last twenty-four hours. He’s confessed and grown crazy with unexpected joy. He’s closed his fist around the apple of the world, and opened his eyes to find emptiness blowing through him like a sandy sirocco. Still, he has a plan. Should we admire him for this? His lips move slightly, silently. He is practicing what he will say when Anju awakes.

  Anju smiles in her sleep. She loosens her grip on the mattress, spreads out her fingers. Her only jewelry, a narrow gold band, flashes in the sunlight. The grace of her muscles, their curve and dip, surprises him as she stretches. She opens her eyes and sees him.

  “Oh, Sunil,” she says, “I had the most beautiful—”

  “Tell me.”

  But remembrance has slammed Anju’s face shut like an iron gate. She struggles into a sitting position, hugs her knees, looks past him at the wall.

  “I don’t want to talk,” she says.

  “We have to. That’s why we’re in this place today, because we didn’t want to talk.”

  From behind the bones of her knees, Anju hardens her voice. “It’s too late now. We don’t know how to talk to each other anymore.”

  “I want
to tell you something,” he says.

  Her eyes fly to his face. There’s a sudden fear in them because—she sees it only now—no matter what she believes he has done, she loves him still. All this time she’s been dreaming of departure, but now that it might be upon her, she isn’t ready to go.

  “What?”

  “A story.”

  Anju stares at him. Her eyes are wide, her body still. Sometimes, she knows, you use a story like a sword, to cut through what’s in your way. Wildly, she tries to find something to distract him, but he has started.

  “A long time ago, just before I left India to come here,” says Sunil, “I went to see a movie. It was about a man who falls in love with a dancing girl, just from seeing her on a train. She’s sleeping, so he doesn’t even get a chance to speak to her, but he leaves her a love letter. …”

  Underneath the measured rise and fall of his storytelling voice are hidden phrases like small explosions. Anju feels their reverberation. Tried my best to love you, can’t control this, driving me insane.

  “I know the story already,” she says quickly. “I saw that movie, too. Sudha was with me. That was when she met Ashok first, in that cinema hall. It was called Purabi. The cinema hall, I mean. I’ve forgotten the name of the movie.” She gives a small laugh that isn’t a laugh. “Funny, isn’t it, what one remembers and what one forgets.”

  Sunil continues as though she hasn’t spoken. “They can’t stop thinking about each other, the woman, too, she’s fallen in love with him just from reading the letter. But of course they have no hope of meeting again.”

  Can’t forget her. In my blood like a disease. Can’t live this way anymore.

  Anju sees that her attempts to interrupt the story are futile. It is the story, instead, that will interrupt her life. “But they do meet,” she says sadly. “There are complications—the dancing girl’s jealous patron, the young man’s parents who worry about family honor and want to arrange a match for him elsewhere. But love overcomes all.”

  Don’t hold me back from. My last chance at being happy.

  “I didn’t pay the movie much attention. It was one of those corny Hindi-movie plots. Life wasn’t like that. You did your best to find happiness, and then made do with what you got. But one day the thought struck me, why couldn’t it happen? Isn’t that how we sabotage ourselves, by not believing? If someone could imagine a happy ending, if someone could make a story out of it—”

  Let me go before I start hating you.

  “But in your case, the dancing girl didn’t love you back. She ran off, didn’t she?” Anguish makes Anju’s voice cruel.

  “The dancing girl in the movie ran away, too, if you remember,” Sunil says, drawing on levels of calm I didn’t know he possessed. “But the man found her and convinced her to come back to him.”

  Because I’ll go anyway.

  “Stories have their limits,” Anju says.

  “I need to test them for myself,” says Sunil.

  In the blond kitchen, the man is short and dark, with thick hair which at the moment stands up all over his head because he’s been running his hands through it. He wears a red Chinese dressing gown that is altogether too dramatic for him, that looks like a gift from his wife. Behind thick glasses, his eyes are intelligent and helpless-looking.

  He ruffles his hair again, adjusts his eyeglasses and gives an embarrassed cough. “I’m Trideep,” he says. “You must be Sudha. Nice to meet you.” His Bengali is stilted, the vowels stiff as though cut out of cardboard, as though he hasn’t used them in a long time.

  She joins her hands in a brief namaskar. If she’s nervous, she hides it well. Against her will, she likes the fact that he doesn’t apologize for his father.

  “Please!” he says. “No formalities! After what you’ve just overheard—no point pretending you didn’t—it seems a bit useless, doesn’t it?”

  She runs the sponge over the black granite countertop in which little gold flecks glitter like mica, not committing herself.

  “As you see—” he pauses, wrinkling his forehead, then giving up and switching to English—“we’re all depending on you.”

  Sudha looks unconvinced, especially about that all. But she says, “I’ll try my best. Maybe you can help by telling me what your father likes for breakfast.” With a wry smile she adds, “And what he hates.”

  Trideep shakes his head. “I don’t really know him. I hardly ever lived at home. First it was boarding school in Dehra Dun, then IIT Kharagpur, then graduate school in America. I only went back for summer vacations, and then Mom was always there, taking care of things. I guess I never needed to notice much.”

  “But during this visit—?”

  “He’s different now. When he first got here, he wanted to try everything. Like America was a great big toy store, and he was a kid. He loved ice cream. We’d go to Baskin-Robbins every few days so he could try a new flavor. But, now, whatever I bring him—chocolate chip muffins, lemon-raspberry yogurt—he doesn’t even look. All he’ll say—in that painful stammer—is, Send me home, Deepu. But how can I?” He takes off his glasses and massages the bridge of his nose tiredly. “He’s not well enough to travel, and, anyway, there’s no one back there to look after him.”

  They stand in awkward silence, nothing left to say for the moment. Behind them the Sub-Zero refrigerator, its doors paneled with wood to match the floor, purrs contentedly.

  Sometimes, even when you know it’s useless, you can’t stop trying.

  She says, “If you still want to hear the dream, I’ll tell you.”

  He cannot help glancing at the clock on the dresser. He’s going to be late for work. The only other time he was late was the morning after she was rushed to the hospital.

  Can we forgive him that glance, the way one forgives a nervous tic?

  “Tell me,” he says.

  “I was flying over the ocean. It took no effort, I was so light. There was a breeze. I floated on it, out and out—”

  “And then?”

  “Then nothing. That’s why it was so special. It wasn’t like life, where things have to keep happening, one new excitement after another, or else you feel like you’re suffocating.” She lowers her chin onto her knees, so the last words come out in a mumble.

  “Anju,” Sunil says. He’s never spoken to her this gently. It makes her catch her breath. Strands of hair have fallen over her downturned face. He tucks them behind her ears as though she were a child, raises her chin so she must look at him. “We aren’t any good for each other anymore—you see that, don’t you?”

  Myra’s note tells her to wait until the old man wakes and rings his bell. But it’s 11:00 A.M. already, and he hasn’t made a sound. Sudha arranges a row of chairs to form a makeshift playpen, gives Dayita a set of spoons to play with, and knocks on his door. When there’s no reply, she peers in anxiously.

  “Are you all right?” she asks. It’s dark in here, a musty lack of light accentuated by the sun-glass-wood sheen that characterizes the other rooms. It’s the only room with curtains—the old man must have asked for them. They cover the windows thickly, as anachronistic as medieval tapestries in this house. Sudha goes to open them.

  “Leave it!”

  The old man’s voice creaks like an unoiled hinge, making her jump. He registers this. His eyes glitter with malice, the only pleasure left to him.

  “Good morning! Would you like some breakfast? Shall I help you wash up?” She makes her voice professional and hearty, like the voices of nurses she’s watched on TV.

  “Go away.”

  “You know I can’t do that.” Sudha switches on the room light, but turns it off when he grimaces and covers his face with his good arm. In the dim glow of the night bulb, she wheels in a cart equipped with basins, towels, a pitcher of warm water. “As soon as you’re clean and have fresh clothes, I’ll get you breakfast,” she says as she starts removing his clothes. “What would you like? Cereal? There’s at least three kinds that I saw. How about whole-wheat to
ast? With eggs maybe, lightly scrambled? Myra picked up some really nice honey yogurt at the health food store….”

  She’s babbling, she knows it, but she’s too embarrassed to stop. Apart from her husband, she’s never seen a man naked. (No—there was Sunil, but that was a kind of delirium from which no images remain.) This man—old though he is—what makes it worse is that he so obviously hates her touching him. He shuts his eyes tightly and turns his face away as far as he can. Half of his face is blank and sagging because of the stroke. On the other half, there is a look of such frustration that her fingers falter as she removes the soiled, diaperlike undergarments and runs the washcloth over his flaccid, ruined flesh.

  But certain actions, once begun, must be brought to completion. She knows this. She presses her lips together and forces herself to breathe normally, though the stench sickens her. Smell of body waste and despair. A muscle jumps above the uneven crag of his left eyebrow. She wipes and powders and tugs various articles of clothing over his tense limbs. Embarrassment makes her clumsy. But apologizing would only make things worse. He is a tall man, with heavy, uncooperative bones. Push, push. Raise and bend. Finally, she heaves him into a sitting position and wedges a pillow behind his back. Sweat beads her upper lip, her breath is ragged, her hair has come undone, curls sprouting everywhere as though she’s been in a wind. But she smiles, pleased at her achievement.

  “There, does that feel a little better?”