Sister of My Heart (27 page)

My mother-in-law glares at the maid, who scurries out. “It’s Deepa,” she says, her voice volcanic.

Deepa is Aunt Tarini’s daughter-in-law, a plump, sweet-faced girl with hardly a word to say for herself. At her wedding my mother-in-law had seemed to take a liking to her.
Isn’t she pretty
, she’d said to various relatives.
Why, she’s almost as pretty as Sudha
. And,
It’s good she has a placid nature—she’ll need it with that Tarini
.

What could the placid Deepa have done to put my mother-in-law into such a state?

“She’s pregnant,” my mother-in-law breathes venomously and looks down at me with accusing eyes.

The concrete kitchen floor seems suddenly icy. My knees are ice too. My thighs. Blocks of ice clatter into being in my chest. For the last two years Ramesh and I have been trying assiduously for a baby, but with no success.

How much I want a baby to fill the empty spaces inside me! Somewhere in those unending nights when I lay beside Ramesh trying not to think of Ashok, the longing for a baby swept over my entire being until it became larger than the love I had left behind. I do not know exactly how it happened. Perhaps it was because I felt motherhood was my final chance at happiness. Perhaps I believed it would give me back what wifehood had taken away. Or perhaps it is just that desire lies at the heart of human existence. When we turn away from one desire, we must find another to cleave to with all our strength—or else we die.

Certainly the desire for a grandchild has been central to my mother-in-law’s life as well, though she tries to hold back her anxieties. Still, every month she asks me eagerly if I’ve had my period. And when I nod guiltily, the silent disappointment in her eyes is worse than anything I can imagine her saying.

Today, however, she isn’t silent. “After that woman told me she was going to be a grandmother,” she spits out, “she shook her head with pity.
How long has it been since Ramesh has been married?
she asked innocently, as though she didn’t know it to the day.
My goodness, is it over three years already? I’d get Sudha checked by a doctor, if I were you
. Then she broke off to pat her daughter-in-law’s arm.
Go and lie down, Deepa Ma
, she said, sweet as sugar-water.
After all, we wouldn’t want anything to happen to my grandson, would we?
I asked her how she could be so sure it was going to be a boy, and she said they’d stopped by at a fancy medical office in Calcutta where they have machines that can look into a woman’s stomach and tell you everything.”

My mother-in-law kicks at the steel bucket, starting up a frantic clatter of claws. All her plans for victory over Aunt Tarini have come to nothing. Even the largest lobster in the world is no match for a grandson, after all.

Then she looks at me, eyes narrowed and speculative, and I see she is not going to give up so easily. She’s making plans, and while she makes them she eyes me with a new coldness, as though I were something inanimate, a rock perhaps in the path of her goal, something for her to climb over. Or blast away.

I BALANCE THE
bag of groceries on my hip and brush my short hair from my face as I try to unlock our apartment door. The key sticks in the lock, as usual, and I have to jiggle it—quite a feat, considering that I’m also holding on to Sunil’s newly cleaned jacket. I can feel the bag of groceries beginning to slide. I make a frantic grab at it—there are eggs inside—and lose the jacket. The letters I just got out of our mailbox scatter all over the doormat. Bills, pizza coupons, a computer-generated flyer addressed to Single Resident. Under the Memorial Day sale announcements from Sears I glimpse a distinctive cream envelope. My heart begins to beat unevenly even before I see my name written in my mother’s neat script because lately there’s been no good news from home at all.

“Shit!” I say, bending awkwardly to pick things up. “Shit!” Of all the American terms I’ve avidly gleaned in the three years I’ve been here, it’s my favorite. It’s explosive, exact conciseness expresses how I feel a lot of the time. But I’m careful to use it only when Sunil isn’t around because he thinks it isn’t lady-like. I point out that I hear far worse from him when he’s driving. He claims that’s different.

The door finally opens with a protesting
kreek
, but I wait a bit before going in. Even now, I don’t like walking into an empty apartment. There’s something about the air—unpeopled and stagnant, like it’s from the bottom of a well that dried up a long time ago—that makes me uncomfortable. That’s when the longing
for the house of my childhood shakes me the most. How irritated I used to be at the constant commotion—milkmen, vegetable sellers, Ramur Ma shouting at the neighbor cat who’d sneaked into the kitchen, Pishi calling me to go for my bath. Now I’d be glad to see even the teatime aunties!

Inside, I drop everything on the kitchen table and collapse on the couch. I’ve been out since morning—first I took Sunil to the train station, then I went to my classes, then I caught up on some assignments at the library, then the grocery, then the dry cleaner’s. I’m in a terrible mood—hunger always does that to me. That, and the fact that there’s nothing to eat unless I cook it first. Of the many realizations I’ve had since I came to America, the foremost one is that I hate cooking.

Not that there’s time to cook. I have to pick Sunil up from the station in thirty minutes, and it’ll take me a good fifteen just to get there. So it’ll have to be frozen burritos again. I know what Sunil’s going to say. Well, he won’t really say anything, but he’ll give me that look, as if his life is one big burden and guess who’s responsible. That look always provokes me into a fight, and tonight I don’t want to, I’ve got to save my energies for the letter from India. So I drag myself off the couch and throw together onions and tomatoes and a few spices for a rice casserole to go with the burritos. I leave the stove on low, though Sunil’s warned me that it’s dangerous, wipe my hands on my jeans, and take the steps two at a time. Of course I hit every red light on the way to the station, and the motorist behind me honks and yells “Fucking Eye-ranian” because I’m not quick enough to make a left turn before the signal changes.

It’s not what I imagined my American life would be like.

After dinner—which has turned out surprisingly good, the casserole a success in spite of my cavalier handling of it—we settle
down, Sunil at the computer, me on the couch with my books and the letter, which I’m still not ready to deal with. Sunil has put a jazz tape into our old player. The room fills with notes drawn out like threads of airy gold, at once melancholy and exhilarating. As they seep into me I have to admit that I was being overdramatic earlier. I have a tendency to do that, as Sunil’s pointed out.

Sunil’s shoulders lean eagerly forward as he works on a program. Sometimes I get angry that he pays more attention to a machine than to me, but at other times I watch him, fascinated. There’s something reverent in the absolute attention he gives to the numbers flickering across the neon screen. Watching his fingers move effortlessly across the keyboard, I feel I have a deeper insight into him than if we were merely talking.

I need all the insight I can get, because Sunil’s the original man with a hundred faces. Even after all this time I can’t tell which ones are really his, and which are masks pulled on for effect. He writes devotedly to his mother every week. He never mentions his father, though every month he sends him a sizable money order, more than we can afford. Once I asked him about it and he said, shortly, that he was buying back his freedom. When I was sick last winter he sat up all night, massaging my feet with Vicks, holding a basin for me to throw up in. But another time when I’d run out of writing paper and looked in his desk drawer for some, he yelled at me for not respecting his privacy.

Unlike some of the other Indian husbands I know, Sunil’s always encouraged me to feel comfortable in America. He taught me to drive and introduced me to his colleagues at work. He bought me jeans and hiking boots, and when I said I’d like to see how I look in short hair, he said, “Go for it!” He’s taken me to malls and plays and dance clubs and the ocean. And finally, though money is short, he’s been enthusiastic about my going to college to get a degree in literature.

But when one evening I suggested we read some Virginia Woolf together, he shook his head emphatically.

“All that arty-farty stuff is not for me.”

“But you bought the whole set from our store,” I said, perplexed and disappointed. “I thought you really liked her work.”

“Nah. In the introductory letter your mother had written to us she’d mentioned that she was one of your favorite writers, so I thought that would be a good way to start a conversation.”

My cheeks burned. I felt cheated. Used.

“And then when I saw how you got all fired up about her, I thought it’d be nice to get the whole set for you. It cost little enough in dollars,” said Sunil. He picked up one of his computer journals and leafed casually through it, unaware of—or unconcerned by—my distress. It was obvious he didn’t think of his actions as deceptive.

I thought back to the young man that I’d fallen in love with that day. How the light had shimmered around his cream silk kurta. Now the table lamp threw distorted shadows of our silhouettes on the cramped apartment walls. Was this always how dreams of romance ended? Did the same thought cross Sunil’s mind when he saw, waiting for him across the Caltrain parking lot, a tired, irritable woman with tangly hair and spice-stained jeans?

There are days when Sunil takes the car to work and doesn’t come home until midnight. By then I’m crazy with worry and anger. I know he’s not in the office—or at least he’s not picking up the phone—and when he finally returns and I explode with accusations, he just shrugs and says I have to let him live his life too.

“What does that mean?” I scream at him, holding him by the lapels. “What the hell does that mean?” All the time I’m trying not to examine him for signs—slurred words, the smell of alcohol, or worse, a stranger’s perfume. I’m hating myself for what he’s reduced me to, sniffing at him when he returns like a suspicious bitch. And he’ll pull my hands from him calmly, and go into the bathroom to brush his teeth.

Sometimes I think of leaving Sunil and returning to Calcutta, but I know I never will. It’s not from fear of the gossip I’d have to face, nor because of how sad and anxious Mother would be. It’s not even because a life left behind, cauterized like a wound, cannot be opened up at will for one to step back into.

It’s because in some dark, tangled, needful way I can’t quite fathom, I love Sunil more now than ever before.