Sister of My Heart (26 page)

“But, Anju,” says Sudha, looking at me with amusement, “no one makes me do anything. I like helping my mother-in-law. After all, she’s getting old and frail, and has worked so hard all her life—”

To me, Mrs. Sanyal looked tough as alligator hide and fit enough to outlast us both by decades. But Sudha always did have a tendency to see only what she wanted.

“The servants do all the heavy work, but you know how it is—” Sudha nods her head wisely, just as Mrs. Sanyal might. “They’ll steal the clothes off your back if you don’t watch them every minute.”

Oh my princess of the snake palace, is this what you’ve dwindled into?

I try once more. “Doesn’t it bother you that Ramesh is always going off to faraway places, leaving you alone with his family?”

Sudha shrugs. “He can’t help his job, and they’re my family too. Besides, when he’s here, he’s so kind, I have nothing to complain about.”

I want to shake the platitudes from her mouth. Is kindness enough to satisfy you, as if you’re a stray dog? I want to say.
Forget Ashok, but what about your other passions? Your own clothing design business? Taffetas and silks and satins and eyelet lace?

Is this what marriage is, this settling for the mediocre? The thought terrifies me.

A dappled sunlight falls over Sudha as she picks up a ripped pant belonging to one of the boys and continues her mending. Her stitches are neat and precise. Is it a trick of the dusty afternoon light that her face seems suddenly far away, like an anemone at the bottom of the sea which might disappear in a swirl of sand if the current changes even a little?

It strikes me that that’s how fragile her happiness is.

What right do I have to judge my cousin for the ways she’s chosen in order to survive? What right do I have to be disappointed because she no longer sees herself as the heroine of a romantic tale? Who am I to say that small joys are less valuable than a passion which shatters your life?

And so, for the rest of my visit, I focus on what we have. We talk about the mothers and the old house, all the great times we’ve had there. I compliment Sudha on the new dishes she’s learned to make, and ask for second helpings. When Ramesh goes out of town I sleep with her in her big bed, and when she falls asleep, I press my face into the cloud of hair spread over her pillow and breathe in the smell, so that I’ll carry it with me to America. When it’s time to leave we hold each other for a long time. Marriage has complicated our lives, divided our loyalties, set us on our different wifely orbits. Revealed things we must keep from each other. Never again could we live together the way we did in our girlhood, that time of simple and absolute raptures. It would be too dangerous.

But no matter how far we travel from each other, our hearts will always be inseparable.

When Singhji picks me up at Howrah station, I lean back against the familiar cushioned seat and close my eyes. The childhood journeys I took in this car were so much simpler, though
then I hadn’t recognized them as such. Tears are seeping from under my eyelids. It’s not simply the sorrow of parting—surely that wouldn’t leave me with this sense of prickly dread. Little images explode against my eyelids, getting all mixed up. When just the three of us were out for a walk, Ramesh put his arm around Sudha. But when Mrs. Sanyal’s around, he hardly even looks at her. The bowl of chutney Sunil’s father threw at his mother, how it arced through the air, staining it a dejected brown. The day a neighbor lady brought over her little grandchild, Mrs. Sanyal smiled her hard smile and said,
Soon I’ll have one to show you too
. Sunil’s eyes had glittered like light on the edge of a knife when he fought with his father.
Drinking and whoring, don’t think the stories didn’t get back to me
. Later in bed he hadn’t bothered to deny the accusations.

“Is something wrong with Sudha Didi?” Singhji’s voice makes me jump. In all these years, I don’t remember him ever initiating a conversation. Against the darkness of his beard, his scarred face looks paler than usual. Of course he’d be concerned! He always did have a special bond with Sudha, a conspiratorial friendship, right from the time he’d stop the car so she could give away her lunch sweets. And he’d taken some big risks to help her with Ashok. I wish I’d been more thoughtful and agreed to have him drive me to Bardhaman. Now he probably won’t have the chance to see her for a long time because Mrs. Sanyal didn’t believe in Natun Bau going to too many places.

“She’s just fine,” I assure him. “Everyone in her new home likes her.”

“They are lucky to have her.” He nods his head with emphasis, then adds, kindly, “And your new family is lucky too.”

Impulsively I ask, “Singhji, do you think we’re going to be happy in our husbands’ houses?” Immediately, I’m irritated with myself. What can I expect this old man to say except the meaningless traditional responses:
Of course
, or
I’ll pray for it
.

But I’m wrong. “You must make your own happiness, Anju Didi,” Singhji says with a passion that takes me aback. “You
must be wise enough to recognize it when it comes. And if it doesn’t come in spite of all your efforts, you must do something about that as well.”

I want to ask what one can do to capture a truant happiness, but we’re at the gate already, and at the end of the worn driveway, under the cracked marble of the entry arch, I see the mothers waiting, their tense, eager faces like lights flickering in a gale.

SOMETIMES WHEN
I realize that over three years have passed since I placed the wedding garland around Ramesh’s neck, I cannot quite believe it. My days have such a sameness to them, a hypnotic placidity, like a pool into which nothing ever falls, leaf or stone or human life. I float on this pool. I know I am needed; I know I am liked. And so I am not unhappy.

Even sex with Ramesh—for after a few months, one night he put his hand on my breast and I let him, it was his right after all, and he’d been patient enough—is only a minor inconvenience. For I have discovered that if I try hard enough, I can shut down my mind while things are being done to my body.

I’m glad to know from Anju’s letters that her life is very different from mine. The quiet rhythms of my existence would have driven her to desperation—I saw that even in the brief space of her visit. Her restlessness, though she tried hard to hide it, made me restless as well. It affected the others too. The boys were more demanding than usual, and Ramesh quieter. And my mother-in-law, who is usually busy with her own work, would come by a dozen times on the merest of pretexts, almost as though she were keeping an eye on Anju and me. And so when it was time for Anju to leave I was sad, but not unhappy. Much as I loved her, she reminded me of all the things I had chosen to give up.

So perhaps it is best that now all we have of each other are our letters. Letters are so much more comfortable, so much less
complicated than people. In them the world can be reduced to an inch-wide window, can be idealized like a touched-up photograph. This is truer of my letters than Anju’s, which vibrate with all her feelings and opinions. But since they are reduced to the rectangular white silence of paper, I can enjoy them without worrying about whom she might offend with her frankness.

Even then there are problems. In Ramesh’s family, the day’s mail is passed out at dinner. My heart starts beating fast as soon as I glimpse, among the bills and boys’ magazines and advertisements for Ayurvedic remedies, the blue aerogram from America. When it is handed to me, I glance through it very quickly, only taking in half, because in a minute my mother-in-law will ask how Anju is getting along. From her cool, clipped tones I know she feels I should show her the letter. But no matter how much I want her approval, I cannot do that. It’s something I promised Anju during her visit.

At night, after everyone has gone to bed, I go into the bathroom. I switch on the dim bulb and lean against the water tank to read the letter one last time, slowly, intensely, trying to commit every word to memory. Through the rustle of the sheet, I can hear Anju’s eager voice trying to show me her world. I picture the bedroom she has decorated with the silk bedspread we bought together at the Maidan fair, the vase of bulrushes she and Sunil picked during a hike, the Chinese dinner they had last weekend. I try out the delicious, exotic syllables,
chow fun, mu shu, braised tofu
, delighted that she is experiencing so many brave new things. In my reply I address her as
Anju, mistress of chopsticks
. On the day she writes that she has started taking classes at her local college, and describes for me the strange American chairs with little desktops attached to them, I weep for joy.

Next day when I am alone in the kitchen, I take the letter from my blouse, where I have kept it all night, and drop it into the unun. As it warps into ash, I wonder how Anju gets rid of my letters. Not that she has much cause to. My letters are as wholesome and bland as the milk-and-mashed rice that is fed to babies.
Because I, Sudha, who was for so long the keeper of secrets, no longer have secrets worth sharing. This life I have built over the cinders of my passion and my pain, this life where I have redefined happiness as usefulness—how blameless it has been, how unremarkable. Until today.

Today the household is in a flurry, because Ramesh’s Aunt Tarini, his late father’s sister, has come to visit us from Bahrampur. She has brought with her a retinue consisting of her oldest son and his bride of six months, her ayah, her chauffeur, her doctor, and various impoverished female relatives who serve as her confidantes and spies. My mother-in-law is determined to impress them all, even if it kills her.

It is a rivalry that goes back decades, Ramesh has told me, to the time when my mother-in-law was a new bride in this house, and Aunt Tarini (just a girl herself) had wrinkled up her nose and said, “Oh my, is this the jewelry your father gave you for your wedding? Why, even our maidservants wear better things!” My mother-in-law did not come from a rich family—her father had been forced to mortgage his house to raise her dowry—and Aunt Tarini’s insult had lodged in a deep place inside her, festering. Years later when Aunt Tarini’s husband took a mistress and moved into a separate house, she’d been heard to remark that she understood perfectly why the poor man behaved as he did. To which Aunt Tarini retorted that at least
she
hadn’t driven her husband to the cremation ground.

When I got married, Aunt Tarini gave me a silk sari just like the one my mother-in-law had bought me to wear during the Bardhaman ceremonies, but with more gold embroidery on it. In retaliation, my mother-in-law presented Aunt Tarini’s daughter-in-law with a monstrously heavy seven-strand gold necklace at her wedding last year. Ramesh had protested, in his quiet way. We can’t really afford it, he said, and besides, what’s the point? But
she brushed his words aside like flies, as she always did when he disagreed with her. And he gave in, as he always did at such times. This morning, when Aunt Tarini arrived, she brought six suitcases filled to the brim with gifts for our family, including the servants and the neighbors. I shudder to think what my mother-in-law will do when, later in the year, it is time for our annual visit to Bahrampur.

I am sitting on the kitchen floor, instructing the maid about which spices to grind—we are preparing a daunting feast, enough to give Aunt Tarini a week-long heartburn—when my mother-in-law hurries in. At first I think she has come to check on the lobsters that our fish seller delivered this morning, the hugest I’ve ever seen, clanging their claws angrily at the bottom of a steel pail. Bahrampur has no seafood worth speaking of, and my mother-in-law has gleefully confided in me that she can’t wait to catch the look on Aunt’s face when the lobster curry is served.

But when I look more closely I can see that she is furious. Her lips are clamped shut and there are thunderbolts in her eyes. It unnerves me to see her like this, for I’ve always thought of her as a large, rooted banyan, spreading her comforting shade over the family.

“What’s the matter?” I ask, wishing that Aunt Tarini had never left Bahrampur. “What has she done now?”