Vine of Desire

  He says nothing.

  “How about that breakfast now?” She recites the list of foods again. He doesn’t respond.

  “I guess I’ll just get you some cereal, then.” She returns with a bed tray, which she places over his legs, and a blue ceramic bowl filled with Cocoa Krispies and milk.

  “I was going to bring you Toasted Oats, but these looked like they would be more fun,” she says conspiratorially. “Your son must have bought them. Somehow I can’t imagine Myra crunching Cocoa Krispies, can you?”

  The old man stares expressionlessly past her efforts at humor.

  “Here, take the spoon.” She closes his left hand over it. “Come on! After last night, I know nothing’s wrong with that hand!”

  He makes his fingers limp so the spoon falls and skitters under the bed.

  “Oh, very well. I’ll feed you. Though I would think you’d prefer to do it yourself.” She cleans off the spoon, fills it, and brings it to his mouth. “Open, open.” She butts the spoon against his lips as she does with Dayita. Perhaps it’s the playfulness in her voice that makes the old man comply. Or maybe he’s ravenous after all these days of holding out. He lets her pour the milky cereal into his mouth, chews for a moment, and then, just as she nods encouragingly and lifts another spoonful, he spits at her with all his strength. Half-chewed gobs, dark brown, spatter her cheek, her hair. She touches her face, looks disbelievingly at her soiled fingers. Her eyes are full of shock. He stares at her defiantly, his face twisted in a snarl that could be a grin. Her hands are shaking. She presses a knuckle against her lips. Then she snatches the tray from the bed and runs out.

  It is the year of temporary compromises. On a continent halfway across the world, Russia signs an accord titled “Partnership for Peace.” On an island at the edge of the Atlantic, the IRA agree to cease hostilities. In the bedroom abandoned by the woman he is wild for, Sunil makes his voice toneless, the way one does when afraid of losing control. He moves his body toward Anju in cautious investigation, like someone swimming over sharp coral.

  “For a long time now, we’ve just made each other unhappy.”

  She shuts her eyes and holds her breath so that a sound like airplane engines fills the space between her ears. Still, she hears him.

  “I can’t afford to do it anymore. Half my life is gone. I don’t want to waste the rest.”

  She turns toward the dresser. There’s dust along its top, which surprises her. Sudha is always so neat. The fake wood grain swirls like gigantic thumbprints.

  “The company is transferring me to Houston very soon. I want to start the divorce proceedings as quickly as possible.”

  She slaps his fingers from her chin, lifts her arm as though warding off something evil. She’s understood nothing, she thinks, and no one. Not her will-o’-the-wisp cousin, not her traitor husband, not herself. After she lost her baby, she thought nothing would hurt her this much, ever. What is this sensation in her chest, then, like the ribs being sawed away? She wills her mind to think of things that have nothing to do with this moment: jacarandas, saxophones, ginger tea. But everything is connected to him. She hadn’t realized they’d done so many things together. Even poetry—the only line that will come to her—betrays her. My life closed twice before its close.

  He’s saying, “I know you hate me for doing this, but one day you’ll see it was the right decision.”

  She gestures with her hand: Please go. She must save this last bit of herself, the dregs of her dignity. Mustn’t let him see how much it hurts. She doesn’t begin to cry until he has left the room.

  Four

  Sudha

  I hold my face under the kitchen tap and scrub until the water numbs my skin. I bend my head and rub at my wet scalp roughly until all the mush is washed away. Still, I feel dirty. When I stand up, I’m light-headed with bending over for so long. Cold water dribbles into the back of my shirt and down my spine. My teeth chatter. My insides are black ice.

  So many violences done to me. My mother pounding my life into the shape of her desires. My mother-in-law wanting to cut from it whatever she considered unseemly. My husband backing away, with his narrow, apologetic shoulders. Sunil plunging into the center of my body, corrosive with need. Each time, I made myself pliant. I gave a bearable name to what they did. Duty. Family honor. Filial respect. Passion. But today … The old man’s spit on my face, so frank in its hate. I couldn’t pretend it meant something else.

  Why didn’t I fling the cereal bowl at him?

  Whore, he’d cried last night. His voice had crackled like kindling. He’d looked straight at me, his stare flinty with recognition.

  Inside the box of my chest, a rack of alphabets, rattling. When I put the letters together, they say, This is your punishment.

  I feel a tug on my pant leg. Somehow Dayita has pushed aside one of the chairs. She holds out her arms to be picked up. When I bend down, she pats my wet face with both hands, then tries to wipe off the water. I bury my face in her chest and hold her tight. We’ve been running from place to place, hoping for shelter, for such a long time. And finally I thought I’d found it here. Sanctuary, if only for a few months. Enough time to lick my wounds, catch my breath.

  Dayita doesn’t squirm away as she usually would. She smooths my hair the way I sometimes smooth down hers. She pulls at my earlobes and sings a tuneless baby song.

  Last night, while she slept, I pressed my face to her sticky fingers, fisted around a corner of her blanket. I’ll take care of you, I whispered. I won’t need anyone’s charity.

  Anju, what would you do?

  An old habit. Whenever in my life I’ve been in trouble, I’ve asked this question.

  I’m not thinking of the cousin I can’t talk to anymore, the wife who might be cursing me right now, the woman so whittled by loss that I can hardly recognize her. My Anju is the fierce girl I grew up with, incandescent with outrage. The old monster, she says inside me. The stubborn, selfish goat. Determined to make the whole world as miserable as he is. How dare he ruin things for me and my child! Who made him my judge?

  I’m not Anju. When I try to hate the old man, I can’t help remembering the feel of his helpless, frozen flesh. How cold his limbs were, how stiff and reluctant. And suddenly I’m thinking of Singhji’s body—how it must have felt when they found him in the morning. My father’s body. A white wake of pain follows the words as they speed through me. To die alone like that!

  Who knows what my future holds. And Dayita’s. The futures that I have fashioned out of my carelessness. My mouth sours with fear as I think this. Still, I make myself lift Dayita high and swing her around. “If this is going to be our last day here,” I say to her, “let’s have some fun.”

  I walk over to the gleaming music system, its rows of buttons and knobs that on another day would have daunted me. I experiment until I get the tape player going. Among stacks of Tibetan chants and New Age fusion, I find a cassette of Hindi music. A song with a fast beat comes on. I remember it from the streets of India, blasted from the speakers of a hundred shops, whistled by cheerfully unemployed young men who stood on street corners, smoking and spitting. It seems appropriate, since I, too, will be unemployed soon.

  Pyar Divana Hota Hai, goes the song. Love is crazy. The danger of clichés is that there’s always a bit of truth to them. Hadn’t we all believed in crazy love, waiting just around the corner of our days? Hadn’t we all wanted the rush of that passion? We’d no idea how it might stalk a life, tear it to pieces.

  I turn up the volume and swing my daughter around to the beat. The past is the past is the past. Dayita laughs, her new teeth gleaming. Six of them, I see with a pang. The last couple came in while I was too preoccupied to notice. Or is it that I haven’t given her too many occasions to smile?

  “Let’s take a long bubble bath,” I say, nuzzling the back of her neck. From Myra’s bathroom I appropriate a bottle of aromatherapy gel that’s supposed to soothe my chakras. It’s the least the world owes me and my daughter. We
fill the tub, climb in, splash each other. Mountains of fragrant froth rise around us. Froth on our Santa Claus eyebrows, froth mustaches on our lips. I’ve left the door open so our laughter mingles with the music. Gata Rahe Mera Dil, My Heart Is Singing. I hope the old man is listening. I hope every syllable pierces his black heart.

  In Myra’s sparkling modern kitchen, I prepare an old dish. Bhaté bhat. It’s a steamed dish that people ate before starting on a journey because it was quick and easy. All the years of our childhood, Anju and I never went anywhere. But sometimes, when we were sad, Pishi used to make it because we loved it so much.

  I search through the kitchen: rice, yellow mung dal, potatoes. Some things I substitute for others, hoping they’ll do. Isn’t that the traveler’s life, substitution and experimentation? For the coarse-skinned jhingay with its large seeds, I use zucchini. For sweet kumro, I use a slab of banana squash. With some misgiving, I replace the pungent mustard oil so popular in Bengal with extra-virgin olive. For some things, there is no making do: bitter melon, the small brown taro roots. Regretfully, I let them go. Tomorrow I’ll tell Myra to get some from the Chinese market. Then I remember that I’m leaving.

  In India we would have tied each ingredient into a piece of old cloth and steamed it with the rice, letting the flavors soak in. Here, I boil them in a pan, then mash them into balls flavored with salt and olive oil, a little pepper. I should have cooked this for Anju when I was living with her. God knows we were sad enough. She must be in her history class now, with that old professor who lisps, whose voice makes her doze off. Or is she in bed, her head burrowed under her pillow … ?

  No, I can’t afford such easy sentimentality. I removed myself from my cousin’s life the way a gardener uproots a choking weed. I must not return there, even in thought.

  “Half the fun of bhaté bhat was that we both ate it from the same plate,” I tell Dayita. “That’s what you and I’ll do today.” I fill a big plate, rice surrounded by a border of colorful vegetables. Then an idea comes to me. I make up another plate.

  I place the cart within reach of his bed, but not so close that he can snatch up something and throw it at me. Not that he looks like he’s up to throwing much. The bedcover drawn up to his mouth. Only the craggy, pinched sharpness of his nose visible. The plate is so pretty, the cheerful green of zucchini, the warm yellow of the squash. The steaming rice, a small ivory hill. He must have eaten the dish many times in India. I want to taunt him with familiarity. I pour mango juice into a blue mug. He doesn’t look, of course. Loose folds of skin hang from his cheekbones like Silly Putty. His breathing sounds like air forced through a too-thin pipe. I am sorry for him and angry, too.

  I say, “Not eating will only make you sicker, and then you’ll need to be hospitalized again. Is that what you want?”

  He doesn’t open his eyes. The lids are sunken, creased and purple. Is he getting dehydrated? Then I harden myself. Why should I worry? There’s water on the bedside table, in plain sight, in a no-spill cup.

  The air is full of the buttery smell of mashed potatoes. My stomach growls, reminding me that I haven’t eaten since morning. I hear a distant crash. What has Dayita knocked over now?

  I make my voice low and threatening. “If you don’t let me help you, I’ll have to quit. And then what do you think is going to happen to you?”

  He doesn’t respond. His breathing doesn’t change. I might as well be a buzzing fly. Troublesome, but not worth the effort of swatting away.

  We’re sitting in the passage outside the old man’s room because I want to make sure he can hear us. I’ve spread a bedsheet and put down Myra’s best velvet cushions. “As though we’re empresses,” I tell Dayita, spooning rice into her mouth. The wall here is mostly glass. It overlooks Myra’s backyard. Bearded irises. A tree filled with brilliant disk-shaped purple flowers I must ask her the name of. I imagine our conversation. Myra, I’m quitting, I can’t stand that evil old man for another minute. But before I go, what’s that gorgeous purple tree in your yard called?

  Lalit would have known how to make a joke of it. But I’m not Lalit. I’m merely me. The only thing I know to do now, when all my other plans have failed, is to tell Dayita a story.

  “So the old king traveled across the ocean to see the world,” I say. “But he must have set out during rahukal, for when he arrived, he found that he’d lost the ability to speak. This made him sad beyond imagining, and then angry, and when in his anger he opened his mouth and screamed, a host of horrible toads fell out.”

  I use my sweetest voice, hoping Dayita doesn’t understand the words. “This frightened his son and daughter-in-law. They didn’t know how to help him, and, besides, they were getting tired of finding toads in their closet and bathtub and sometimes even their bed. They sent the man off to a castle where other old men like him were kept. There the attendants bound up his mouth so the toads would have no way of escaping, and fed him gruel through a tube attached to his nose. Every night they put him in a machine that sucked out his memories, until slowly he began to forget who he was and what he was sad about.”

  I pause to eat a bite of squash, grown cold by now. Lumpy and disappointing, it tastes nothing like the dish of my childhood. I maneuver some into Dayita’s mouth. She promptly spits it out.

  I’m not sure how to end the story, so I leave it unfinished. Isn’t that the nature of today’s stories, anyway? Besides, I have too much on my mind to be inventive. I must put Dayita down for her nap, call Lupe to come and get me, pack my few things. I fold away the bedsheet, replace the cushions. Dayita bangs on the glass, chattering to a squirrel that runs along a branch. My stint as Scheherazade is over.

  The old man’s room is very quiet. He’s lying in the same position as before, his bony chin angled up to the ceiling. My heart races. Don’t die, don’t die. No, there it is, the slight fall of his chest, the long pause before it rises again. But the cart has been pulled closer to the bed! I see that he’s eaten a few mouthfuls of the bhaté bhat and drunk a little juice. As I wheel the cart away, he opens his eyes and sends me a baleful glare.

  I keep my smile to myself until I’m out of the room. The match continues, but this round is mine.

  I cook a celebratory dinner: yogurt chicken, Basmati rice boiled extra-soft. I go easy on the spices so it won’t bother the old man’s stomach. When Myra comes home, I’ll ask her to watch Dayita while I go for a walk. She’ll be too happy to object. Hopefully there’ll be a phone booth along the way.

  I make the easy call first.

  “Where the hell are you?” Lalit says. “Are you okay? How’s Dayita? I’ve been out of my mind with worry.”

  “We’re fine. But how did you know—?”

  “Sunil phoned me last night. He thought you might be with me! I’ve been calling everywhere since then—the police, the hospitals. Naturally no one knew anything. Just a little while back, I called Anju, hoping she’d found out something. The phone rang and rang. I was about to hang up when she answered. I asked her if they’d heard from you, and she said no. When I asked her what had happened, she hung up on me.”

  I swallow.

  “If you’re in trouble, couldn’t you have called me?”

  There’s a riff of hurt in his voice—and something else I’m not ready for. How to explain why I couldn’t ask him for help? Instead, I ask, “How did Anju sound?”

  “Not good. Like she’d taken a sleeping pill or something. I’d ask something and there would be a pause, as though she were trying to get her mouth around the words. I asked where Sunil was. She said he was gone—whatever that meant. When I asked if she was feeling all right, if she needed something, she didn’t answer.”

  All the elation I’d been feeling drains out of me. I lean against the phone booth, the metal wall sharp and chill between my shoulder blades.

  “You plan on telling me what’s going on?”

  “When I see you,” I manage to say through rubbery lips.

  “I’m glad to hear that you plan o
n seeing me. Would it be too much to ask when?”

  Don’t be angry, Lalit. Not you, too. “Sunday morning, if you’re free.”

  “If I’m free! Shit, Sudha, you know I’d rearrange—” He breaks off, then says more calmly, “Where?”

  I give him Myra’s address and phone number and explain about my job. I ask him not to call, except in an emergency. I tell him not to give the number to anyone.

  “Want to elaborate on anyone?”

  I don’t reply.

  “I won’t pretend I understand,” he says, sounding tired. “I just wish you’d trusted me enough to say something before you disappeared like that.”

  I can’t bear to apologize, so I say, “Tell me a joke, a really dumb one.”

  “What, you think I’m a humor machine?”

  “Please …”

  He sighs. After a moment, he says, “A man goes to visit a psychiatrist. ‘Doctor,’ he says, ‘I think I’m a frog.’ ‘How long has this been going on?’ the psychiatrist asks. The man replies, ‘Since I was a tadpole.’”

  I laugh. But later I’ll wonder why he chose that joke about self-delusion, if there was a message in it for me.

  “I’ll see you Sunday,” I tell him.

  “I live in anticipation,” he tells me.

  Anju picks up on the very first ring, before I’m ready for her. Has she been waiting by the phone? I picture her sitting on the floor of the dark, dusty living room, her head bowed against the sofa, all the knots I combed out of her hair back there again.

  How to begin this conversation?

  “Sunil?” Anju says. “Sunil, is that you?”

  “No, it’s me.”

  Anju doesn’t ask me anything—not where I am, not why I left. She doesn’t even ask about Dayita.

  “Anju, I’m sorry I had to leave so suddenly. I didn’t want to worry you. I had no choice. Please believe me.”

  “You don’t have to explain. It’s your life.”