Sister of My Heart (6 page)

And my mother? Perhaps she longed for my father to succeed in
something
, so that she could see him once more as she had done, briefly, on that first evening by the glittering river. Perhaps a part of her longed to love him—for surely all women long to love their husbands—even while another part condemned him as unworthy of her love. Perhaps she wanted the father of her unborn son to be a hero. Perhaps this victory—so long awaited—over the fate which had doomed them to dependence would make it finally right, that decision she made early one morning, stealing
from bed, leaving the shelter of her parents’ home for the sky that yawed and pitched above a creaking riverboat.

But maybe I am wrong. Perhaps she was thinking only of the rubies. Strings of rubies at her neck and ears, bangles studded with them, rubies encircling her slender ankles like the fire’s laughter, causing all the neighbor women to murmur their envy as she walked by.

“They left a week later,” says Pishi, “dressed in the clothing of adventure: khaki pants, thick leather boots like neither had ever worn in his life, round safari hats which Gopal must have seen in a movie. They took a taxi to Howrah station, not the house car, for their mysterious partner insisted that no one must see him. There must be no breath of gossip, it was a matter of his honor. He told them that his own family did not know anything about Gopal and Bijoy either.

“After the train journey they were to take the boat along the river and then into the swamps. Next they would hike into the heart of the jungle. The partner had arranged everything, proper equipment, tents, adibasi coolies to cook and carry for them. Beyond that they did not know, except that they were sure to be back in two weeks, long before the babies came. The ruby, which was indeed genuine, they left safely locked in the bank vault.

“For weeks we waited, fretting for news. Then one morning the telegram arrived. It informed us that the Sundarban police had found two bodies and the charred remains of a launch in the swamp. No, only two bodies, said the police when we telephoned them, though of course there might have been others, the crocodiles may have got to them first. They were a small police force out there in the backwaters, after all, with a large area to cover. No, it wasn’t a robbery, one of the men still had his gold watch and cuff links. In the other’s pockets were two plastic-wrapped moneybags. Possibly Bijoy had given his to Gopal for safekeeping—it was the kind of thing he liked to do. The bags held a few rupees and some papers with our address on them. That’s how the police were able to track us down.

“For weeks I would wake in the middle of the night, my chest aching with a sorrow so deep it was physical—as though someone had been pounding on my heart with a grain-crushing pestle. But even in my grief I realized that my loss was small compared to that of the two wives. Ah, I couldn’t bear to look at their faces as they took off their jewelry and put on widow’s white and wiped the marriage sindur from their foreheads as I had once done. Especially your Gouri Ma. I’d known her since she came to this house as a bride of seventeen. I’d held her and comforted her in the first homesick days when she wept for her parents, just as she would hold and comfort me a few years later after my husband’s death. I couldn’t stop thinking of the morning of the ill-fated journey when she had asked Bijoy, one more time, not to go. And then, when he said he must, she had said, ‘What if you don’t come back?’ He had laughed and touched her cheek and said, ‘Don’t be silly. I’ll be back before you even expect me.’ But Gouri had not smiled. She’d said, ‘But what if you don’t?’ And Bijoy, suddenly serious, had said, ‘Then I expect you to bring up my child as befits a descendent of the Chatterjees. Will you promise me that?’ And Gouri had looked at him with a sadness in her eyes, as though she knew already what was to come, and said, ‘I promise.’

“She never forgot those words. In the days after the funeral, she wouldn’t allow herself to break down as your mother did. When I tried to get her to weep, to let the sorrow out of her heart, she said, ‘I don’t have the luxury. I made a promise and I must use all my energies to keep it.’ That’s when she started going to the bookstore every day—the pawned lands were forfeit already—and when people, even her own relatives, said that it was a scandal, no Chatterjee wife had ever done such a thing, she looked at them with a hard face and told them she would do whatever was necessary to ensure her daughter’s future.”

We sit together, silent, pondering the mystery of the deaths, feeling once more their far, tragic reach into our lives. Finally,
Pishi pushes herself to her feet with a sigh. The kirtan will start soon, and she must go. The past is the past, and regrets, as the priest at the temple said in his katha last week, imply a lack of piety, a resistance to God’s will.

“Wait,” I shout as she reaches the edge of the stairs. “You didn’t tell me the secret.”

“It was there in the story,” says Pishi. “One of them. If you didn’t hear it, maybe it’s for the best.” And she starts down the staircase with slow, unsteady steps, leaning painfully on the banister because lately her arthritis has been bothering her. But for once I do not care for her pain.

“It’s not fair,” I shout. “You tricked me.” Anger turns inside me like a broken spear tip. Ah, how helpless we children are, how dependent on the whims of adults. I’m shaken by the injustice of this, my life. And so I fling at my aunt the most hurtful words I can think of. “You broke your promise! I hate you. I’ll never trust you again.”

The footsteps pause.

“Very well, my poor Sudha,” Pishi says from the bend of the stairs, “so eager to lose your brief innocence, I’ll tell you what you want. Not because of your childish threats but because I am bound by the promise I made.” And sitting there in the gloom, her face turned away from me, her voice echoing eerily up the stairwell, she speaks the rest of the tale.

“It was the night before Bijoy and Gopal were to leave for the ruby cave. I was checking the house doors to make sure they were locked when I saw the light in Bijoy’s office room. I went to see why, and there he was, holding a letter. When he noticed me, he started putting it away, then sighed and handed it to me. It was from a man I didn’t know, a certain Narayan Bose. From his letterhead I could tell he was a lawyer. The postmark was from Khulna in Bangladesh.

“Khulna, remember, was the city our uncle, Gopal’s father, had gone to after that enormous fight with our grandfather.
Gopal had grown up there—he often spoke with longing about his father’s beautiful home, seized by the rioters along with the rest of his property during the partition riots.

“ ‘I’d written to Narayan Bose to see if we could buy back my uncle’s house in Khulna,’ said Bijoy, and as he spoke I noticed how stricken his face looked. ‘I thought it would make Gopal happy.’

“Narayan Bose had written back that it was not possible to buy the house in question. The daughter of the original owner—and here he gave our uncle’s name—was currently living there with her husband and children. She had inherited the property ten years ago when her father died, as there had been no male heirs.”

“What do you mean, no male heirs?” I break in from the top of the stairs. “What about my father—”

“No male heirs,” says Pishi, staring woodenly at the wall. “And the daughter, the only child, had no wish to sell the house. It was probably a good thing, Narayan Bose wrote. The house had been broken into during the riots and parts of it set on fire. There were many other homes, far superior, that Bijoy could purchase for the same price.

“ ‘So he isn’t related to us at all,’ I said to my brother. My voice shook with rage, and my hands also, as I remembered how I had trusted Gopal—but perhaps even that name was a lie, made up for the benefit of his gullible ‘cousins.’ But it wasn’t just rage I felt. It was pain too. I’d loved your father, the way he would come and ask me for a cup of tea,
Didi, you make the best cha I’ve ever tasted
, the way he’d stop at the Paush fair to buy for me the syrupy nolen gur I particularly liked. I had loved—but what was the use of thinking of it, when it was all a lie.

“ ‘The cheater, the fake,’ I cried. ‘He should be whipped out of the house tomorrow, first thing. I’ll tell the gatekeeper myself. No. We should turn him over to the police. He deserves to rot in jail.’

“I would have said more, but the look on Bijoy’s face made me stop. I hadn’t known a man’s face could show such heartbreak. And I realized that however much I’d loved your father, Bijoy had loved him far more.

“We stood there, silently, for a long time. When the clock struck midnight we jumped, as though we were the guilty ones.

“ ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked, and Bijoy pressed his fingers to his temples and said, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I can’t think.’

“ ‘You mustn’t go with him tomorrow,’ I said. ‘He can’t be trusted.’

“But Bijoy fisted his hands and said, ‘I’ve got to find the ruby cave—for myself more than anyone else.’ And then he said, ‘Maybe I’ll talk to him when we’re alone on the river.’

“ ‘You mustn’t do that,’ I said. ‘He might get desperate and do something, who knows what. And you don’t even know how to swim.’ But even as I said it I felt I was being melodramatic.

“Bijoy must have thought the same, for he shook his head with a half-smile. ‘Oh, Didi!’ he said. ‘This isn’t the movies! What are you thinking? That Gopal will push me overboard and watch me drown?’

“He was right. Gopal might be a liar, a fortune hunter, but he was no murderer. Besides, Bijoy was the head of the family. I had to believe that he would know how to handle this situation.

“We did not speak of the matter again.

“Bijoy did pranam to me before he left, touching my feet for blessing, and asked me to keep a lamp lit in front of the gods in the puja room. I held him as I whispered prayers into his hair, and for a moment a forgotten memory surfaced, from where I don’t know: how, before I left for my husband’s house, I would rock Bijoy in my arms—he was just a few years old then—his little body slumping into sleep, the smell of his hair like melted sugar.

“I kept that lamp lit every day, I prayed each morning and
night to Ganesh, remover of obstacles, and Kali, protectress against evil. But I couldn’t stop the arrival of that death-bearing telegram.”

How much time passes before I realize that Pishi is gone and I am alone on the terrace? Vaguely I remember her coming back up the stairs when the story had ended, with tears in her eyes. Her trying to comfort me, and me holding my body hard and stiff against her, shoving her from me.

Now you see why I didn’t want to tell you, Sudha
.

Go away, go, leave me alone
.

For how long did I cry, and when did the tears get used up? Now laughter is spilling out of me in great, bitter gusts, because the past is not reliable and solid, the roots of a huge banyan, as Pishi has always led me to believe. The past is a Ferris wheel like the ones at the Maidan fair. A giant Ferris wheel, spun faster and faster by my father until it careens out of control. Until it is wrenched from earth, flung into the emptiness of the hot yellow sky.

My father, the handsome rascal, the masquerader with the dangerous, diamond laugh, blown in on a bad-luck wind. Who took the lives of this household into his hands and with his thoughtless wanting broke them like rotted drywood.

And my mother, who—it comes to me now—is my other secret.

My beautiful mother with that haughty look always on her face. My mother hinting through a toss of her head, an angling of her elegant neck, how much better things had been in her parents’ household. My mother, who was really the daughter of peasants, washing soiled clothes by a muddy river, who thought to erase her ancestry with a clever tongue.

The shame of their lies floods my head with thick crimson. Shame and more shame because others had watched them masquerade, first with suspicion and then with knowledge. Pishi, and surely if Pishi, Gouri Ma too. Watching them and me, knowing us for who we were long before I did.

There’s a stabbing in my belly, again, again, so that I must double over with the pain. A cramp wrenches my whole body. Perhaps one can really die of shame, as the old tales say?

Then I feel the hot trickle between my thighs, and know. Will the blood be the same color as the rubies my parents longed for, and with that longing brought catastrophe to the Chatterjee family?

Ah, my sweet Anju with a world of love in your eyes, what would you say if you knew?

The thought is a wave I could drown in. I hold my breath against it as I walk to the darkening mango strips. The sun has slid down until it is impaled on the thorny fronds of the coconut trees. It is long past the time when I should have turned the mangoes over, as I promised Pishi. I bend to them and begin my task even as blood soaks my underwear, even as I know what the result of my action will be. But I don’t care. I
want
my touch to rot it all, to turn everything in this faithless world black with fungus.

I try to focus on the salt-coarsened strips in front of me, but one final thought breaks over me, takes my breath. It makes me rock myself back and forth, with pain or fear, I don’t know which. And the thought shapes itself into a wail that spirals tornado-like through the old mansion of the Chatterjees, shaking every stone: I, Sudha, am nothing to Anju. Not twin, not sister, not cousin. Not anyone except the daughter of the man who with his foolish dreams led her father to his death.

When I come back to myself—is it an age later?—the terrace darkening like dying coals around me, Anju’s voice calling me impatiently downstairs, mock-scolding, and my own voice answering her, joking back, I know this: Something has changed between us, some innocence faded like earliest light. The air we breathe now smells of salt and seaweed, as when, the fishermen on the Ganga say, an ocean storm is about to rise.