Sister of My Heart (22 page)

I am seeing a boat rocking in a river that winds along the swamps of Sundarban. Monkeys yammer hideously in the vine-choked trees overhead, and in the distance one can hear the howling of
hyenas. Mosquitoes buzz and buzz, and tempers are short. It is too hot, there’s not enough wind to guide the sail, and the three men are tired of rowing and of cooking their own meals, now that they have sent the bearers away for safety’s sake. The elation they felt on finding the cave—for indeed they have found it, and gathered their rubies, and tied them securely into their waistbands—has been replaced by a strange depression. Because they have adventured and won—and are no different from when they left their easy Calcutta existences. And it is in this frame of mind that my uncle Bijoy picks a quarrel with my father one evening when their partner is at the other end of the boat, cooking the night meal. He tells my father what he knows, and accuses him of being an impostor, a liar, a cheat who took advantage of the goodness of the Chatterjees.

And my father? Does he deny it? Does he plead for forgiveness? I do not think so. A black rage breaks over his face that Bijoy should have spoiled things just when luck had at last smiled on him. Rage mixed with shame, which is the worse kind. Before he realizes what he is doing, he has picked up an oar and hit my uncle over the head. The
thwack
of wood hitting flesh ricochets through the forest. The body slumps, sacklike, into a corner of the boat. And when the partner comes running, crying
What was that?
there’s nothing to do but swing the oar again.

Does my father weep, then, kneeling beside the man who had loved him like the brother he never was? No. I will not give him tears. Dry-eyed, teeth clenched, he lifts first one body, then the other—how like sleeping children they are, slack-limbed and trusting in his arms—to drop them over the side. But first he raises their shirts to untie the pouches. Is it hard for him to touch their still-warm skin? To slide his moneybag into the pouch where he knew Bijoy kept his, feeling, under his fingers, a still-beating heart? Does he shudder when he hears the first splash, and then, like an echo, the second? Does he jump, startled, when, from the shore, he hears a pack of jackals yelping their displeasure?

And that night, when the white moon rises in the ink sky and a pair of night birds circle the mast, crying like the souls of the dead, is he frightened then, my father? Does he wish the act undone, the act that has cut him off from his wife and coming baby, forever? The act that will force him to change his name and, with only the baleful red glow of the rubies for company, move to some faraway city. But no, the postmark on the envelope said Calcutta. A shudder goes through me as I realize he has been inhabiting the outskirts of our lives for years, watching us. Maybe he sat in a taxi across the street when school was done and Anju and I came strolling out. Maybe he brushed against me when we went shopping in the crowded corridors of New Market. Maybe he stopped outside our gates late at night and watched the lights go out one by one, and imagined my mother and me in our beds. What thoughts might go through the head of a man like that? Through and through and through, until one day, eighteen years later, he sold a gemstone and stacked the banknotes in a pile and picked up a pen and wrote,
To Sudha
.

Ah, Mr. Majumdar, what would you make of this, the scandal to top all scandals?

“Sudha,” says Pishi urgently. “Pull yourself together. No one must know that your father has reached out for you from the darkness of the death world.”

A corkscrew of laughter is boring its way through me. What did she think I was going to do, shout it from the rooftops?

“You must decide what to do with the money.” Pishi’s voice is anxious.

It’s hard to focus on details. Finally I say, “Take it to Kalighat for me. Give it to the beggars. And have a puja done for my uncle’s soul.”

“I am so glad you said that.” Pishi lets out the breath she’s been holding. “It’s blood money, yoked to misfortune.”

“I have to go,” I say. I must be alone, must try to make some sense of who I have become today.

“Sudha,” says Pishi, putting out her hand as I stumble to the door, “Whatever your father did, it’s not your fault.”

But I shudder away. Words have no power to comfort me. To touch me is to be contaminated. Because once upon a time a man raised an oar and brought it down on another’s head. His rage is a river that runs through my body, and its waters are my blood. That is the blessing-gift my father has sent me.

IT’S HORRIBLY HOT
in the wedding tent. I’m suffocating under the thick weight of incense and the wail of conch shells and the jabbering of wedding guests. The heavy gold and red Benarasi I’m wearing isn’t helping either. I’m standing right in front of Sunil, but I can’t see his face because the women are holding up a silk sheet between us. They’ll lower it only after the priest finishes the mantra he’s reciting to bring us good luck. It’s a thousand-year-old mantra from the Vedas and defines luck as cattle and horses and vassals—and the one hundred sons I’m supposed to present to Sunil. A wicked laughter’s beginning to bubble up behind my throat as I listen. I’ve got to control it until Sunil and I are alone. Unfortunately, that won’t be until the fire ceremony and the puffed rice ceremony and the bridal flower-bed ceremony and a hundred other such ceremonies are over. Still, when it finally happens we’ll laugh together, and it’ll be a better beginning to our married life than a hundred mantras.

The mantra’s very long, and the priest chants it in a singsong voice that makes me want to yawn. But it isn’t proper for brides to yawn, so to distract myself I watch my husband’s feet, the only part of him visible under the edge of the silk sheet. I admire the curve of his arches, the cleanly clipped toenails. Thank God his toes don’t sprout stiff black hairs like so many men’s do. (I’m an authority on male feet—in the last few days I’ve touched at least a hundred belonging to elderly relatives to whom I’m supposed to show respect.) At the end of the wedding I’m supposed to touch
Sunil’s too, to acknowledge him as the head of our household. Maybe if no one’s watching too closely—or even if they are—I’ll tickle them instead.

Somewhere off to the side, Sudha and her husband are going through the same ceremony. I know I should be focusing on the silk sheet—my eyes are supposed to meet Sunil’s as soon as it’s lifted, for that’s the moment of auspicious seeing—but instead I crane my neck to look for Sudha. No luck. All I see is the flash and glitter of bangles and earrings, the bright stippled tints of a hundred silk saris. It feels as if all of Calcutta has crowded itself into the space between us.

If I could just see Sudha’s face, I’d feel better. Something happened to her yesterday afternoon after I lost my temper and stomped off. If only I hadn’t. Because when I came back she was lying on the bed, covered all the way up to her head in a thick bedspread though it was a hot day. I could tell she wasn’t asleep, so I pulled the cover off. She didn’t move. Her face was dripping with sweat and she kept her eyes closed until I shook her and called her name, and then she looked at me like she didn’t know who I was. It reminded me of the time when one of the maids had spilled a pot of boiling dal on herself. Huge blisters had sprung up on her arm, and Pishi had made her put it in a bucket of ice water until the doctor arrived. “Does it feel a little better?” she’d asked after a while. The girl hadn’t answered. She’d just stared at her with the same animal look of baffled terror.

Once I would have known, even without Sudha telling me, what the problem was. But recently it’s like a fog has drifted between our hearts. At first I’d blamed Sudha for it. I told myself she was purposely distancing herself so it wouldn’t hurt her so much when we had to say good-bye. But now I wonder, as I stare at my husband’s feet, if maybe it wasn’t just as much my fault because I’d been too drunk with my newfound desire to pay attention to her silent distress.

“Anju! Anju!” The women have let the sheet fall and are calling my name.

“Here’s her husband, right in front of her, and she’s dreaming about someone else!” one jokes.

I blush and raise my eyes to Sunil’s. He’s smiling, eyebrow raised. He’ll probably tease me about it later, too.
Who was it you were thinking of so intently that you almost let the moment of auspicious sight pass?
But when I explain my worries about Sudha, surely he’ll sympathize. I expect no less of a man who loves Virginia Woolf.

Now we exchange the garlands that Pishi has made for us. Jasmine and rose and night-blooming gardenia. I’ll never smell them again without feeling Sunil’s fingertips brushing my throat like a flame. The ends of our garments are tied together, and we walk seven times around the sacred fire. My hand feels so right in Sunil’s strong, warm grasp, like a nesting bird that’s found its home. “My heart is yours, as yours is mine,” I repeat after the priest, pronouncing each word as clearly as I can. “For seven lifetimes will I follow you to the ends of the earth.” Sunil’s hand tightens on mine, and I know he’s heard the conviction throbbing through my voice.

The ceremony’s going to continue for a long time—the putting of sindur on the woman’s forehead, the recital of more mantras, the official giving away of the bride, the recital of even more mantras. But as far as I’m concerned it’s done, because I feel joined to Sunil, for ever and ever.

We’re supposed to move to a different part of the tent for the next ritual, but I ask Sunil to wait a moment. I want to watch Sudha complete her seven circles around the fire. How beautiful she looks.
More beautiful than she’s ever looked in her life
, I hear the guests whisper as they admire the chandan marks on her forehead, the translucent flush on her cheeks, the way she lowers her thick lashes modestly as she follows Ramesh. But then they’ve never seen her bare-breasted on a stormy night, her soul flashing in her eyes.

At they walk, Sudha stumbles over the edge of her sari. Ramesh turns quickly to keep her from falling. But she has
righted herself already and moves back just a fraction so his arm won’t touch her. Her face is a shell, with whatever had been alive inside scraped away. It frightens me. It’s as though I’m seeing the old tale enacted again—the princess of the snakes who has lost her beloved and been captured by the stranger-king. Now she has no other choice but to follow him to his barren kingdom.

A great sigh shakes me, all the way to the core of my heart. Oh, Sudha, why did you do this to yourself? And me, too busy with my own unforgivable pleasure, why didn’t I stop you?

Sunil mistakes the reason for my sigh.

“Yes, she’s lovely, truly lovely,” he says.

There’s nothing unusual about his words. All my life I’ve heard men—and women, for that matter—admire Sudha, often much more extravagantly. But there’s something in Sunil’s voice that makes me give him a sharp glance. “The loveliest of women—” he murmurs, very softly, then breaks off. He keeps gazing at Sudha—almost as if he isn’t capable of moving his eyes away. His face is naked and open, like a house with no curtains. And because I’m so deeply in love myself, I recognize exactly what I’m seeing in there.

A long time ago, in school, I’d watched a movie of a California redwood tree that had been struck by lightning. It hadn’t burned up, as one would have expected, or been charred black. From the outside, it looked almost like the other trees. But one day a man leaned against it—and the tree crashed to the ground. When they looked inside, they saw that its entire core was hollow, and filled with ash.

I feel like I’m that tree.

I go through the motions of the rest of the ceremony. Sunil marks my forehead with sindur. I slip a ring onto his finger. We chant more prayers for conjugal bliss. When Sudha passes by us, following her husband with listless steps, Sunil’s voice falters as he says, “And I will protect you and treasure you and love you as my Lakshmi, my goddess of prosperity.”

How is it no one else notices this?

But of course I’m overwrought. Light-headed from the wedding-day fast, I’m reading too much into a glance, a pause. And even if I’m not, how can it matter? Sudha will remain here while Sunil and I go to America. After this night, he’ll probably never have the occasion to see her again. Even otherwise she’d never betray me, not in a million lives. Still, in spite of all my logicking, my mouth is parched, my fingers shake and spill things, and when we stand up, I too stumble and Sunil has to grab my elbow.