Sister of My Heart (40 page)

My mother is absolutely against my turning Ashok down. “Go ahead and agree to whatever he asks now,” she says. “You can always change a husband’s mind, especially if you’re giving him what he wants in bed.” When I look shocked, she says irritably, “Come on, Sudha, you’re not a child anymore. Be a little practical. If you’d thought of these things earlier, you might not be in this state today.”

If you had agreed to Ashok’s proposal earlier, I think bitterly, I wouldn’t be in this state today either.

“Hush now, Nalini,” Pishi says. “You know our Sudha never was the self-serving kind, thinking one thing while speaking another. But you’re right in advising her to marry Ashok. He truly is a fine man. Not many girls get a second chance like this. We’ll gladly take care of Dayita—and we’d do a good job too, among the three of us. Isn’t that so, Gouri?”

Pishi, I know you will. But can even three grandmothers take a mother’s place?

“Yes, yes,” says Gouri Ma. She is staring out at the tamarind pods, which hang like swollen black fingers from the branches, and I think I sense a certain hesitation in her. But when she speaks, she only says, “All Ashok wants is a few years alone with you. That’s not too much to ask, is it?”

Don’t tempt me, Gouri Ma. Already I’m too weak. Already I want too badly to clasp the hand of love Ashok is holding out to me
.

“Indeed it isn’t,” my mother says. “I’ve known men who’ve insisted that women send children from an earlier marriage to the orphanage—”

“We were talking again yesterday, Ashok and I,” says Gouri
Ma. “He agrees that when Dayita is of school age, she can spend all her holidays with you—”

“Summer, puja time, Christmas,” says my mother, counting them off on her fingers. “What more could you want?”

I want the man who is to be my husband to love my daughter unconditionally. Perhaps it is too much to ask. But having settled for too little once, I’m not willing to do it again
.

“It’s not like we’re trying to get rid of you, my dear,” Pishi adds. “You know how much we love you. But we’ve learned, all three of us, how hard it is to live out your days without a man. Unfortunately, the world hasn’t changed that much since we lost our husbands.”

“At least people were sympathetic to us because we were widows,” says my mother. “What do you think they’re going to say to you?”

“Dayita’s my daughter,” I say. “She needs me. How will I face her later when she asks me why I abandoned her for the sake of my own pleasure?”

“Listen to her!” my mother protests. “Is it abandoning the child to leave her with three loving grandmothers?”

“In my heart I would be abandoning her,” I say, looking straight into Gouri Ma’s eyes. They are cloudy with sadness, as though she knows how stony the road I’ve chosen will be. But she understands.

“Don’t prod the poor girl any more, Nalini,” she says. “Let’s see how things turn out. Let’s hope Ashok will change his mind.”

But I do not hope for that. On the day Ashok sent my matchstick dreams crashing, I promised myself I would no longer place my hopes on a happiness that was held in someone else’s hand. I weep my tears in secret, and they scald me like molten iron. But when I write to Ashok that I cannot give Dayita up, no matter how much I love him, it is with an unfaltering hand.

Last night I dreamed of Prem. He was blue as Krishna, and floating like a snowflake in milky light. He stretched out his little hands to us, Dayita and me, and said,
Come
. I woke in tears, not knowing why I was crying. All afternoon a residue of melancholy sits on my heart like silt. I try to clear it by designing a quilt, but my patterns turn out wrong, and my wastepaper basket is full of crumpled sheets.

Perhaps I am distracted by the letter I received from Anju yesterday.

In the letter Anju wrote she wants us to come to America. America had its own problems, she said, but at least it would give me the advantage of anonymity. No one in America would care that I was a daughter of the Chatterjees, or that I was divorced. I could design a new life, earn my own living, give Dayita everything she needed. Best of all, no one would look down on her, for America was full of mothers like me who’d decided that living alone was better than living with the wrong man.

I read the paragraph over and over. What Anju said opened up an avenue I hadn’t considered. This way I would not be a burden on the mothers, who had already used up too much of their limited resources on me. And now that Ashok had come and gone again from my life, meteorlike, leaving a smoky, searing trail behind, there was nothing to keep me in this country.

And yet I hesitated. This little flat, already familiar. The mothers’ glad cherishing. And over there: the ways of an alien land, an alien people. The fear of being a burden once more.

Because though Anju did not mention him, Sunil was there, in the gap between every word. When Anju wrote that a man could never appreciate what I was going through, I understood what it meant. When she wrote she was working, secretly, to save money for my ticket, I understood that too. Sunil did not want me in America.

I did not blame him. It was natural enough that a man should want to keep what was his for those who were his—his wife
and his son. And if there was something else behind his reluctance, the shame of a heat-fused afternoon in a garden narcotic with honeysuckle and lost control, I understood perfectly that he didn’t want a reminder of it.

Neither did I.

I locked the letter away in my trunk. I did not mention it to the mothers.

I’m better off in Calcutta, I tell myself now as I begin to trace a pattern of blue on blue. So many women are surviving here on their own—I can too. Surely my skill with the needle must be worth something. This quilt, it will be a test. I’ll stitch it, then have Singhji take it to the Anarkali Boutique on the corner of Rashbehari junction. Maybe they will like it and place an order for more.

From who-knows-where, a sudden wind blows grit into my eyes. When I raise my hand to rub at them, it snatches away the paper I am drawing on. I lunge for it but the wind is too quick. The sheet tumbles over the sill and disappears under the feet of the multitude of passersby below. Involuntarily, I shiver. Is this the Bidhata Purush’s chill, vindictive breath warning me not to stitch into my life patterns he has not placed there?

Stubbornly I pull out another sheet and begin to draw again. I
will
prove myself. I
will
be in charge of my fate. I
will
pattern a new life for myself. I swat away the superstitious unease that buzzes in my ear like gnats.

The new design is even more beautiful than before. Concentric circles of lotus buds, the spiral of death and rebirth, and in the center, a single opened flower to symbolize freedom from this earth-bound life that we humans have crowded with our complex sorrows.

Almost every evening we have visitors. Relatives, friends, old neighbors and new ones. More people than ever visited us in the
old house. They come out of curiosity to see how the Chatterjee women are dealing with their reduced fortunes. They come to express their sympathy, but they stay to watch in amazement and not a little envy.

Along with the old house, the mothers seem to have shrugged off a great burden of tradition. Perhaps, ironically, I helped it happen. For now that I have come back neither wife nor widow, now that I have let go of all that society considers valuable, what is left for them to fear? Away from those ancient halls echoing with patriarchal voices which insisted that foremost of all they must be widows of the Chatterjee family, for the first time they can learn to live their lives with a girlish lightness.

The mothers have joined book societies and knitting classes. They go for walks around Victoria Memorial. They volunteer at Mother Teresa’s Shishu Bhavan and (chaperoned by an insistent Singhji) attend all-night classical music concerts from which they return, cheeks flushed with the early morning cold, humming a song in the bhairav raga. They take day trips to Dakshineswar and bathe in the Ganges. After they have prayed at the temple, they eat singaras on the river steps while the afternoon sun dries their hair. Already they are talking of a trip to Darjeeling in the summer. It wouldn’t cost much—Gouri Ma’s cousin brother has a bungalow he’s offered to her many times, the mountains would be lovely and the weather cool for Dayita, we’d get to drink the best tea, fresh-packed from the local cha-bagan, and go see the sunrise from Tiger Hill.

“It’s not
right
,” says Sarita Aunty, who is visiting today, between large, disapproving bites of the sandesh Singhji has fetched from Ganguram Sweets down the street.

The mothers have cut down on cooking too. Except for a few dishes Pishi makes for me from time to time, they leave the kitchen mostly to Ramur Ma. On rainy evenings they order crispy lentil-stuffed dalpuris from Ganguram. And once I caught them at the panipuri vendor’s, snacking from shal leaves right there by the mini-bus stop.

“But you never used to allow Anju and me to do that!” I protested. “It isn’t fair!”

The mothers smiled benign smiles.

“You can eat whatever you want now,” my mother said, her tone expansive. “Now that you’re all grown up.”

“Yes, why not?” said Pishi.

“Once you’ve had the baby, that is,” Gouri Ma added.

“It’s not
right
,” says Sarita Aunty once more, swallowing the last of her sandesh and licking her fingers daintily clean.

“What’s not right?” my mother asks Sarita Aunty now, a trifle belligerently.

“You know, taking Sudha and the baby around to Darjeeling and all, like that—”

“Like what?” says Pishi, also belligerent.

“Well,” stammers Sarita Aunty, backtracking, “the child will be so small, just a few months, will it be safe to expose her to all kinds of outside germs?”

“Don’t worry,” says Gouri Ma, smiling sweetly. “We’ll keep our granddaughter well protected, and her mother too, away from germ carriers.”

But of course we all know what Sarita Aunty really means.
It isn’t right that you should have so much fun when Sudha’s disgraced you all by leaving her husband. What are things coming to! Instead of making sure she regrets what she’s done, you’re acting like you’re pleased about it. And that baby—you can plan to treat her like a little princess all you want, but we know what she is. A girl without a father. A girl whom no one wanted, except her willful mother
.

All evening after Sarita Aunty leaves, the mothers are extra kind to me, extra cheerful. They tell me stories of when I was little, how naughty I was. They hope my daughter will be naughtier, so that I’ll finally realize what troubles I put them through. They bring out the gramophone and play the records I used to love, folk tunes and nursery rhymes,
Ata gache tota pakhi
, and
Dol, dol, dol
.

I laugh obediently at the jokes. I sing with the record:

The parrot flies to the custard-apple tree
The bees are in the pomegranates
I call and call you, little bride
Why do you not speak?

Later, though, after everyone has gone to bed, I sit at the darkened window and watch the fireflies flickering on and off in the shrubs below. Along the night wall a soundless lizard leaps to swallow a bug. Somewhere far away, an owl, bird of sorrow, cries out in the voice of a child. In my belly Dayita moves sleepily, heart-achingly, confident of protection.

How long can the mothers guard my child from the ugly words, the insults flung at her by people far crueler than Sarita Aunty? How long can I? I can provide for her physical necessities—the owners of the Anarkali Boutique have asked me to become one of their regular suppliers—but what will I say the day Dayita asks me where her father is? And when I tell her—for if I do not, others will be only too happy to—and she asks me why he and his mother wanted her to die, how will I explain it? How will I keep her from believing that she is worth less than nothing? How will I ever wipe that stain from her heart?