Sister of My Heart (11 page)

“I’ve also decided on an early marriage for her. As soon as she’s finished at the convent, I’ll start looking for a suitable boy.”

“But she wouldn’t even be eighteen,” says Mother from somewhere above me, her voice echoing with shock. “That’s much too young—”

“If she’s old enough to fool around with men in movie houses,” Aunt says, “she’s old enough to care for her husband’s family.”

It’s hard to speak from under layers and layers of freezing water, but finally I manage. “What about college? Isn’t Sudha going to go to college?”

“What good is
that
going to do?” says Aunt. “It’ll just put more wayward ideas into her head. Instead I’ll have a lady teacher come to the house to give her cooking lessons. I’m only letting her finish school out of respect to your mother, who’s put so much of her money into it.” She inclines her head at my mother as though she’s doing her a favor.

The water smells dark and musty. It presses down until my chest is about to burst open. “How can you do this?” I shout, only it comes out as a damp whisper. “How can you ruin Sudha’s future—”

“That’s enough, Anju!” warns my mother—but it’s the pity in her eyes that frightens me into silence. “We’ll discuss it later, when our heads are working more clearly. Sudha and Anju—to your rooms. Now! Ramur Ma, go with them.”

We climb the desolate staircase, emptied of words. My heart feels like all the light has leaked away from it. Sudha’s eyes are wide and feverish. A small, new muscle jumps in her jaw.

Oh, why had I been so impetuous? Why hadn’t I thought of consequences?

If I believed in wishing, I’d wish to turn the night back into
the innocent morning. And like in the old tales, I’d be willing to pay any price for it.

But wishing isn’t any good, nor is regret. I’ve got to find another way to undo the harm I’ve done.

At her door I give Sudha a hug, holding her to me tightly. Ramur Ma’s watching, ears pricked up, so I can’t even say how sorry I am. But Sudha knows. And by the way she presses her hot cheek to mine I know she’s forgiven me already.

“Don’t worry, this isn’t over yet,” I whisper. “We’ll fight it every way we can think of.” Already I’m devising strategies, things I’m going to say to Mother, who I sense is on our side. “And no matter what happens, it’ll happen to us both together. I promise.”

I wait for Sudha to agree, but instead she draws back a little and looks at me with a slight, ironic smile. As though she knows already what it’ll take me years to figure out: promises may be fulfilled, yes, but not always in the way we imagine.

LYING IN BED
in the midst of my suffocating rage, I think, strangely, of Hercules. Perhaps it is because at school we have been studying the legends of Greece and Rome. Though the nuns have cautioned us about the pagan heroes and heroines, I am fascinated by them. They seem closer to me than most of the people in my life. I have felt the blue air rushing beneath Icarus’s wings, the ominous trickle of wax down his arms. I have wept with Persephone when the black vaults closed above her head, and then wept again when Ceres took her in her arms the way my mother never does with me.

Tonight I know how Hercules must have felt, trapped in the poisoned cloak sent to him by the one who—he had believed—had only his welfare in mind. My body is pierced by needles of fire, rage against my mother, and my powerlessness in her hands. What gives her the right to control my life, to wall me up in the name of her mother-duty? Wrong, wrong, this society that says just because I was born to her, she can be my jailer.

Earlier tonight, when she pronounced that I must stay home while Anju goes to college, I had an eerie sensation. I felt I was in a dark twisting tunnel which pressed in on me. It took me a moment to recognize it: the birth channel, narrow, suffocating. Only, I was receding up it, going back into the womb, where my mother would keep me, forever and completely engulfed.

Anju, save me.

My bedsheets sting my skin. My pillow is a roasting stone.
Perhaps if I get some water and then go to Anju and lie beside her, listening to her sleeping breath, this night will somehow end.

On my way, tiptoe-silent to the clay pitcher that sits in the passage, I see that the door to my mother’s room is open. Slats of light fall across the floor from the moon on the other side of the barred window. Then I see a silhouette.

Anju. I must get to Anju.

But against my will my feet walk me to my mother’s door. I stand there, shadow among shadows, and watch her. She holds on hard to the window bars, her body taut, her forehead pressed against the rusting iron. She is weeping, but not in her usual way—woeful theatrical sobs, loud entreaties called out to all the deities. She cries soundlessly, my mother, with only the trembling line of her back to tell me what is going on. Then she raises her face and looks at the moon.

And suddenly an old nursery rhyme comes to me.
Chander Pane cheye cheye raat keteche kato
. I’d forgotten that she used to sing it when I was small, while she rocked my cradle, while she smiled down at me.

I have spent so many nights gazing at the moon.
That must be why you came to me, my moon-faced child.
Let us go into the forest, the two of us, you and I,
so I can sit silent and enjoy your beauty
.

To my mother, her life must have seemed like a trick of the moonlight. One moment her arms were filled with silvery promises. The next she was widowed and penniless. Alone in a world of glowering clouds, except for a daughter. Each hour the clouds crept closer, pressed another wrinkle onto her face. Words were all she had to save herself and her child. She picked the cleverest ones and wove them into a careful garland around her throat. Through them, for a while, she could be what she had so achingly wanted, on that faraway morning by the river.

But lately she had felt their fragrance wearing off, their petals
drooping. A single strong gust of wind could blow them into nothingness, leaving her cruelly exposed. And now even her daughter, the one person, surely, that a mother should be able to depend on—the one person she had done it all for—was spreading her wings, called away by other songs.

“Sudha,” whispers my mother against the bars. “Sudha, Sudha, Sudha.” She rubs a hand across her forehead as though it hurts. What word had the Bidhata Purush written on it for her to be seduced so easily by the dream of love? What other word had he written to make her so determined to save me from the same fate? Does she believe—as perhaps all mothers do—that through her daughter she can redeem her life?

Outside, the pipal trees rustle, though there is no wind. They whisper my name in the same longing tones, as though they are familiar with her sorrow, her fear of being abandoned again.

A bird may escape a cage built of hate, of the desire for power. But a cage built of need? Of love’s darkness?

I do not go to the cool sarai of water that waits in the hallway. I do not go to Anju, her sweet arms, the solace of our shared rage and rebellion. I walk back to my room, to the burning bedsheet that twists around me like an umbilical cord. All night I lie awake, thinking of many things.

When the first crows announce morning, with their harsh, startled-sounding cries, I know I will not fight my mother’s will.

Not, at least, in this.

I’M FURIOUS
with Sudha.

“You can’t just let your mother have her way, not in
this
,” I shout as I pace up and down her bedroom. “Without a college education, what kind of life are you going to have? You might as well tie a bucket around your neck and jump in a well right now. You might as well put blinkers over your eyes and join the bullocks that go round and round the mustard mill. That’s all you’re going to be, a beast of burden for some man.”

“Anju, please, sit down,” says Sudha. “You’re making me dizzy.” When I sit grudgingly on her bed, she smiles a small, strained smile. She hasn’t slept all night—I can tell by the bags under her eyes. Sudha could never handle lack of sleep. Next thing I know, she’ll be falling sick.

“But we agreed last night,” I fume, punching at the ugly brown bedspread, chosen—of course—by Aunt N. “We were going to fight it together. I’ve even made a list of the arguments we’d use to get Mother on our side. How can you change your mind so fast? How can you be such a coward?”

Sudha looks at me, her beautiful eyes distressed. And right away I know it’s not fear that’s making her do this.

“Did Aunt say something to you last night?” I ask suspiciously.

Sudha shakes her head. “I don’t want to break my mother’s heart, that’s all.”

“Your mother doesn’t
have
a heart, let alone one you can break.”

“Anju!” Sudha says reproachfully. “Every person has a heart, but we’re not always lucky enough to get a glimpse of it. And every heart, even the hardest, has a fragile spot. If you hit it there, it shatters. I’m all my mother has. I just don’t want her to feel that I too have turned against her.”

“Fine. So you’re going to ruin your life for her? After all the plans we’d made about reading Shakespeare and Tagore together, and learning about the rise and fall of civilizations, and studying the great inventions of modern science—”

“I’ll still be learning important, useful things, Anju.”

“Right, like how to make pantua and lemon pickle.”

“I’ll learn a lot more than that. And anyway, you love lemon pickle!”

“Don’t joke about it. You’ll be wasting all your talents—”

Sudha leans toward me so I can smell the clean neem fragrance of her soap. “Anju dear, don’t be so angry. I’m not giving that much up. Really. I thought about it all last night and realized college doesn’t matter to me like it does to you. For me, there are other things that are more important.”

When I look unconvinced, she says, “Look, I’ll prove it. Tell me, what do you want to do when you grow up?”

She uses the old phrase out of our childhood, although surely at almost-seventeen we’re quite grown up already. But I know what she means. Our life after we marry. Only neither of us is ready to name that exhilarating and terrifying condition—wifehood—yet.

“I want to run the bookstore,” I say. I close my eyes as I speak and smell the place, the mysterious dusty fragrance of cardboard and old paper, the chemical scent of new-printed ink that’s been in my blood almost since birth. “It’ll be hard to persuade Mother, but I’m sure I can. After all I’m her only child, with no competing brothers. That’s why I’m planning to study literature
in college—so I can keep up with the latest writers and stock the best books.”

“What I want most,” says Sudha, “is to have a happy family. Don’t you remember the pictures?”

And suddenly I do. As children each week we’d draw pictures of our future life. Mine were different every time—a jungle explorer swinging from vines, a pilot in goggles flying a snub-nosed plane, a scientist pouring smoking liquids from one test tube to another. But Sudha’s were always the same. They showed a stick-figure woman in a traditional red-bordered sari with a big bunch of keys tied to her anchal. She wore a red marriage bindi in the center of her forehead and stood next to a mustachioed man carrying a briefcase. Around them were gathered several stick-figure children, their sex indicated by boxy shorts or triangular skirts. I’d secretly thought it all terribly boring.

“Yes, yes,” I say now, a little impatiently. “I want a happy family too. But surely there’s something else you want to do—for yourself.”

Sudha hesitates. A dreamy shyness comes into her eyes. I sigh, because I know she’s going to say she wants to marry Ashok. It strikes me that perhaps he’s the reason she gave in so easily—to pacify Aunt N while she gathered her forces for what’s bound to be the biggest battle of them all.

Then my cousin surprises me all over again.

“I want to design clothes,” she says. “Salwaar kameezes. Pleated wedding ghagras with mirrors stitched in. Kurtas for men, embroidered white on white silk. Baby frocks in satin and eyelet lace. I want to have my own company, with my own tailors and my own label, so that customers at all the best stores will ask for the Basudha brand. People in Bombay and Delhi and Madras will clamor for my work.”