Sister of My Heart (9 page)

“Hai bhagaban!” my mother said, turning her appealing eyes toward heaven. “Now she demands to be treated like a son.”

“I
am
thinking of your happiness, keeping doors open to houses you might want to enter someday,” Gouri Ma said. “But I don’t expect you to see that yet.” It seemed there was a wistfulness, subtle as the echoing end of a raga, in her usually practical
voice. But perhaps I was only being fanciful, for the next moment she sent us off to our rooms to do our homework.

She convinced me. But she never convinced my headstrong Anju, who kicked at the marble banister carved with lions all the way up the stairs.

And so this morning Anju whispers, as we stand in the senior girls assembly line at school, “Let’s cut class in the afternoon and go see the new movie, okay?”

“Are you crazy?” I say. Shock makes me forget to whisper, and Sister Baptista, the assembly monitor, turns toward me, her steel-rimmed glasses glittery with disapproval.

“Don’t be such a coward,” Anju says without moving her lips—a feat which never fails to impress me—while she offers Sister an angel-innocent smile. “We’ve run off before, remember?”

“And got caught, which you’ve conveniently forgotten. Don’t you remember how upset Gouri Ma was?” I whisper as softly as I can, but a wave of sibilant sound seems to ripple from my lips and Sister gives me a frightful frown.

“We were a lot younger then,” Anju says, “and we didn’t know how not to get caught.” She ignores the last part of my sentence.

“But we promised Gouri Ma—” I start to say. Her face rises in my mind, austere as a Bodhisattva statue I had once seen at the Calcutta museum. She had looked at me and Anju with such reproach—or is it the future I am envisioning? Since that terrible afternoon when I had learned that mothers could lie and fathers deceive, time coils in upon itself at moments, confusing me.

“I should’ve known better than to ask you, little Miss Holiness,” snaps Anju. “All you ever want is to get into Mother’s good books. You’re probably just waiting to get home so you can
tell her my plan. Well, I don’t care! I’m going to go whether you come or not.”

Somehow I cannot be upset with Anju when she is in a temper like this, for I can see that behind the anger, her eyes are bright with tears she will not let fall. Dear Anju, for whom love means that we must want the same thing, always. That we must be the same. She has not yet learned that ultimately each person—even Anjali and Basudha—is distinct, separate. That ultimately we are each alone.

The thought catches me by surprise. When had I realized this? Was it on that afternoon of secrets, that afternoon of new blood and old tears? Was it on the day of the diamond earrings when I asked Anju why she loved me, and she gave me her answer, sweeter than a sudden spring in the desert of my heart? When had I made the decision not to burden her with the terrible knowledge that ate at me like a canker bug? When had I promised myself that I would spend the rest of my life making up to her for the way in which my father had deceived hers? The way he had tempted him to his death?

Ah, how much older than Anju my promise makes me feel.

“Sudha,” Anju hisses, and I turn to her to say—what? What words can I speak with my throat, which has turned blue as Lord Shiva’s from the poison I’ve swallowed so that Anju might continue to laugh and love and quarrel and make up? So that she might take for granted the surety of our intimacy the way I no longer can?

But I am saved by Sister Baptista, who announces in her sternest tones to the entire room that Basudha Chatterjee is to move to the troublemaker’s row in the front of the room, this instant, for talking in assembly.

As I walk forward, feeling the prick of a hundred eyes on my face, the smirks that say, Ah, finally one of the Chatterjee girls gets what she deserves, I hear Anju say, very softly, “If you were my true, true sister, you’d come with me.”

On the streets it is so hot that the melted pitch sticks to our chappals. The cold-drink vendors with their carts filled with bright orange Fantas and pale yellow Juslas, the slabs of ice sweating under jute sacking, have gone home, having sold out of everything. But the cool darkness of the cinema is a magic country, no less wonderful than the images glimmering bright as jewels on the screen. Air-conditioned breezes wash over us like a blessing, and the slow whoosh of the ceiling fans is as comforting as a whispered lullaby.

Not that I can even imagine sleep.

I’ve been to the cinema a few times before—to educational English films with Gouri Ma and, with my mother, to the sentimental Bengali movies that always make her cry. But I’ve never felt this excitement, this tingling that starts in my toes and fingertips and rises hotly up my body to my throat, my cheeks. To my lips, until they feel swollen and pleasantly sore, as though they’ve been kissed (but here I have to rely on imagination) by a man’s rough mouth.

Part of the reason is our new clothes. Anju stopped in the bazaar next to the cinema and bought us each one of the forbidden kurta outfits. “We can’t go to see the movie in our school uniforms,” she’d said, quick-thinking as ever. “Everyone would know we’d cut class. They’d be sure to stare, and then someone might recognize us.”

“Where did you get the money?” I asked, watching the wad of notes that had appeared, miraculously, in her hand.

“It’s my birthday money,” she said, laughing. “This year I didn’t buy books with it. I had a feeling I’d need it for something else.”

And so in the damp, dimly lit jenana bathroom we changed into the bright kurtas that lay light as wings on our skin. I looked down at my legs in tight-fitting churidar pants, and marveled at
their shapeliness. I couldn’t take my eyes from my breasts, how they rose and fell under the thin fabric colored like pomegranate flowers. How rapidly the pulse in the hollow of my throat beat above the oval neckline of the kurta.

“Final touch,” said Anju as she took from her schoolbag a black eye pencil and—yes, a lipstick.
From where
? But I didn’t ask. I was learning that my cousin had her secrets too.

We darkened each other’s eyes with inexpert fingers and outlined each other’s mouths with the lipstick, which was a rich maroon quite unsuitable for young girls. But we were reckless by now, giggling as we loosened our braided hair to fall in waves around our flushed faces. When we turned to the mirror to admire ourselves, I was shocked at how grown-up we looked, as though we had crossed over a threshold into the house of adulthood. As though there would be no turning back.

“Oh, Sudha,” Anju breathed. “You look stunning. People will be looking at you instead of watching the actresses on the screen.”

“Don’t be silly,” I replied, giving her a little push. But I was pleased. We stuffed our uniforms into our schoolbags and went to get our tickets.

We are lucky: We have good seats, with an unobstructed view of the screen, and though the theater is crowded, there’s an empty seat next to mine where I thankfully drop my schoolbag. I had been nervous about who I would have to sit next to. Whenever we went to the movies with the mothers, they sat on the outer edges, buffers between us and the world. For a heartbeat, I miss their protective presence.

But the hall is so fascinating with its high ceilings and cornices embossed with plaster flowers, the rich red velvet of its stage curtain, its aisles that give off a sweetish smell like the zarda that women chew after meals. And the people. Even after the start of
the film, which is marvelously romantic and sad, just as I had imagined, I can’t stop watching them. The light from the screen casts an unearthy glow on their rapt faces, wiping away lines, lifting away years. As they smile, or touch a handkerchief to their eyes, they appear strangely, heart-catchingly innocent. And yet so mysterious. Even Anju, in the seat next to mine, emotions flitting like moonlit clouds over her face, seems like someone I do not know at all.

Then a male voice says, “Excuse me, is someone sitting here?”

Just my luck! The last thing I want is a strange man sitting next to me, ruining my pleasure in the movie by whistling or making crude kissing sounds during the romantic scenes. I’d heard schoolmates complaining of such things. Maybe I can tell him that a friend is sitting here, that she’s just stepped out for a moment?

But when I look at him, I know I need not worry.

“How could you know, Madam Experience? How many men have you talked to in your lifetime?” Anju would say later. “As it happens, he got us into an awful lot of trouble.”

Sometimes you just know, I would tell her. And the trouble we got into was not his fault.

In the pearl-blue light of the theater, the man’s—but he was not much more than a boy himself—eyes glimmer, dark and bright in turns. His smile is at once open and apologetic. His hair tumbles over his forehead. Charmingly, I think.

“Awfully sorry to disturb you, but I think this is my seat.” He holds out his ticket toward me, pointing to the number. The cleft in his chin can break a girl’s heart.

I lift my schoolbag from the chair. To keep myself from smiling I stare sternly, fixedly at the screen, where the hero has just boarded a night train. In a moment he will see the sleeping heroine and fall in love, unequivocally, irreversibly, in the way of true passion, world without end.

But I can’t stop myself from looking, just once, out of the corner of my eye.

He’s intelligent, I can tell that just by how he holds himself, his body relaxed yet alert. Probably a college student, from St. Xavier’s maybe. Or Presidency. Open at the throat, his white shirt is very clean and smells of mint. And when, heart pounding, I raise my eyes a little higher, his lips are smiling. At me.

How long do we look at each other in that movie hall that is neither in the world nor out of it? How long do we remain suspended in that timeless opal light that gives us strange permission? I don’t know. I must have glanced at the screen from time to time, though I’d long since lost track of the story. (The heroine is weeping as she reads a letter. Then she’s dancing—is it at her beloved’s wedding party? She throws down a glass to shatter on the ground and keeps dancing, her feet smearing with blood, but the pain is less than that which tears her heart. And then it’s the end of the movie, with her in his arms—but how did
that
come about?) It seems to me as though I haven’t looked away from his eyes at all, that I cannot, even when the houselights come on, and people push each other along the aisles in their hurry to catch the buses before they get too crowded.

Lying in bed that night I would marvel at the chance that made Anju choose this very day to persuade me to go to the cinema, that arranged this young man’s seat next to mine in a hall that held so many hundreds. But even then I had known it was no chance but the inexorable force of destiny, hushed and enormous as the wheeling of the planets, which brought us together. And as our glances met, like that of the prince and the princess in the story of the palace of snakes, the final word the Bidhata Purush had written for me blazed on my forehead. But this we had no eyes to see.

They say in the old tales that when a man and woman exchange looks the way we did, their spirits mingle. Their gaze is a rope of gold binding each to the other. Even if they never meet again, they carry a little of the other with them always. They can never forget, and they can never be wholly happy again.