The Vine of Desire (17 page)

“We’ll go,” he says finally, uncreasing his forehead. “We’ll go and see how the rich live. Why not?” He looks at me. A rare, direct glance. A challenge glitters in them. “You, too. After all, you’re part of Sunil Majumdar and Family. Aren’t you?”

We sit on the bedroom floor among piles of clothing. Anju has pulled out our suitcases from under her bed, and we are trying to decide what to wear. We go through mine quickly—there’s only a few starched cottons in there. I had to leave all my expensive
saris behind when I left Ramesh’s house. Anju’s suitcase, though, is filled with her trousseau. Whipped clouds of chiffon and chinon. Fragile Dhakai cottons in monsoon colors. Regal Benarasis, stiff with zari thread. Touch of another lifetime on my skin, to which there is no returning.

“Look how lovely this still is,” I say, picking up the sari Anju got married in. Sprays of gold flowers on royal red. So out of place in this two-room apartment, its shag-haired carpet mangy from my enthusiastic vacuuming.

“There’s nothing like our Indian fabrics,” Anju says. “No wonder you wanted to become a clothing designer!”

I wince. It’s painful to be reminded of dreams that came to nothing. “Stop!” I tell Dayita, who is burrowing into the suitcase, tangling gauzes and satins. She rubs her face on an expensive Kanchipuram silk, undeterred by my shouts. Does she smell the presence of our young selves in the woodsy sandal powder? When I grab for her, she hides behind Anju.

“Oh, quit!” says Anju. “You’re always scolding my sweet Dayu for nothing!” She turns to Dayita and drapes the edge of an embroidered veil over her head. “Don’t you look pretty! Sunil, Sunil, come see our little bride!”

Tomorrow Anju will stop at the bank and take out her wedding jewelry to share between us. My jewelry is still in my ex-husband’s family vault—or being worn by his new wife. Sometimes, because I think I should, I try to feel outrage. But her image is too far away, a tiny reflection at the bottom of a well. How can I envy it? In my imagination, she has the same cowed look as Ramesh.

“Sue them,” Anju said on my first day here, talking like an American. Angry sweat on her upper lip. Her thick eyebrows
drawn together. She had forgotten how things are back home. How a runaway wife has no rights.

“I paid it in exchange for my daughter’s life,” I told her.

Anju bit her lip to stop the tears. “The bastard.” She was always more angry with Ramesh than with my mother-in-law. “Never mind. Everything I have is yours, too.”

Are other people haunted by words as I am? A prickly wind on my skin, making me shiver.
Everything?

I shouldn’t go to this party. The wisest thing would be to pretend to be sick on that day. But I don’t want to be wise.

I pick out a gray sari with a thin silver border, ambiguous enough for a woman whose marital status is questionable. But Anju will have none of it.

“It’s a wedding anniversary, for heaven’s sake, not a funeral!” she says. She chooses for me a lovely, deep silk colored like a peacock’s throat, embroidered all over with tiny gold moons. “That’s a great color on you.” She turns to Sunil, who has come to look at Dayita. “Don’t you agree?”

“Yes,” says Sunil tersely. He tries to pick Dayita up, but she won’t go, not until he tempts her by holding out his keys. There’s a Mickey Mouse on the chain. It squeaks when he presses its stomach, making my daughter laugh and lunge for it. “Sleepytime,” Sunil says, and picks her up. I stare after him in reluctant admiration. How many men would put a Mickey Mouse on their key chain just to please a little girl?

“And I have that necklace with a peacock pendant, and those earrings, you remember them, that match the sari. It’ll make you look quite stunning,” Anju says.

Anju, can’t you smell the storm?

I choose for her a peach silk like the morning sky, the color
of innocence. I tell her she must wear it with the jewelry set Gouri Ma gave her at the blessing ceremony before the wedding—tiny, twinkling diamonds set into filigreed gold.

Anju hesitates. “Don’t you think it’s too showy?”

“It’s a wedding anniversary, for heaven’s sake, not a funeral!”

We burst out laughing, filled with sudden, girlish excitement.

But later in bed I think. He had said,
You’re part of Sunil Majumdar and Family. Aren’t you?

“Of course she is,” Anju had replied, “and our Dayu as well. We must take her, too.” She was looking at the invitation, did it say anything about not bringing children. She didn’t see his eyes. Possession wound its way around me like a nylon line, impossible to break.

I should have said no right then.

I call up the necklace that Anju will wear, its sprinkle of stars clear against the dark air of my room. For a moment I’m in the wedding tent again, the humid, heavy air smelling of sweat and incense and wilting marigolds. Gouri Ma’s fingers fumbling for a moment with the catch of the necklace, the way she stroked Anju’s hair afterward as her lips moved inaudibly, invoking divine protection.

Pray hard, I beg her. Pray hard enough, Gouri Ma, to deflect fate.

Ten

S
unil

Today I’m not going to talk about your mother, kid. Not one word. I’m going to tell you a whole different kind of story. It’s from a long time ago, when I was a boy, maybe ten, maybe eleven, going to school in Calcutta. There’s a lot I’ve forgotten about the story, but I’ll leave the gaps as they are. I don’t want to make anything up, not for you. Between you and me, kid, it’s always going to be the truth.

And if there’s a time when I can’t give you that, I’ll say nothing at all.

So, picture me, kiddo: a scabby boy with pencil-thin arms and legs, khaki half-pants, white shirt—the school uniform of Deshbandhu Boys School, except my shirt’s always torn or smeared with mud from the football field, and my mother’s always mending and washing and ironing, tensely and in secret, so my father won’t give me one of his long, deadly speeches about carelessness and inconsideration and do I think money grows on trees. I’ve just gotten off the school bus, I’m running to the house as fast as I can, holding up a pink notice the teacher has
given me, which I hand to my mother. Her smile collapses into worry as she reads it because what that notice tells her is that the teachers of Deshbandhu Boys School are planning to take the boys to the theater next week to see a matinee show of
Puro-hit O Pradip
, which they believe will promote excellent moral values in their charges, and can the parents kindly send ten rupees fifty paise with the students by day after tomorrow for tickets and bus fare.

That’s ten rupees fifty paise more than my mother has, because in our house, my father is the one who handles the cash, who gives bazaar money each morning to Manik, our servant, before leaving for the office, and takes back the change, along with detailed accounts that had better be accurate to the last paisa, from him in the evening. And who doesn’t look favorably on my mother asking him for frivolities, as a trip to the theater surely is.

I’m tempted to insert a scene here about my mother begging my father for the money, about him ranting and raving and finally refusing, of my mother having to make a secret trip to her cousin in Belgachia, as she sometimes did, for a loan. She was a kind woman, the Belgachia cousin. Whenever we visited, she gave us narus made from jaggery and coconut, and cold water in tall stainless-steel glasses to which beads of condensation clung. And she always allowed my mother to pretend that she’d be able to return the money soon. At the time of my wedding, I bought her a very fancy silk sari, which annoyed my father no end. But I’m digressing.

The truth is, I don’t remember how my mother managed to get hold of the theater money. Those days, I didn’t pay attention to such things. In the self-absorbed way of children, I took it for granted that she would provide what I needed.

What I do remember is the theater.

I wish you could see it, kiddo. It was the most immense hall I’d ever been in, filled with maroon velvet seats so soft that when you sat, you sank into them all the way to your hips. A maroon velvet curtain hung in front of the stage, trimmed with thick gold-tasseled ropes. In the middle of the ceiling, there was a huge white-and-gold lotus, and from it hung an equally huge chandelier that threw mysterious shadows down on us, as though we were in some enchanted cave. All along the cornices, little lights flickered like flames until a flute started playing. Then they went out, leaving us in a hushed dark.

I went back to see the place once, after I was grown and in college, but it was gone and some kind of air-conditioned market had taken its place. I was sad, but in a way I was relieved. For the rest of my life now, I could continue thinking of it the way I remembered it, without my critical adult eye ruining the spell.

And the characters, when they appeared—how can I describe them to you! To me, a boy from class five who had never been taken to the movies, they were like gods. Their gestures were grand and true and touched something in me I didn’t even know was there. The priest was dressed in a white dhoti and wore rings in his ears. His bald head shone with divine light, and his wooden clogs clacked across the stage with an authority that made me hold completely still. The soldiers raised their deadly swords all at once as they marched; their shields were decorated with glittery bronze studs; their commander wore a breastplate of gold and shouted orders in a terrifying voice as he directed them to capture the thief. Even the thief, dressed in tattered robes, with blacked-in circles under his crazed eyes and manacles around his ankles, was a creature out of myth.

For months afterward, I’d act out the story at home in the afternoons,
sometimes for my mother, but mostly for myself. I’d take turns being each of the characters: the saintly priest who takes in the escaped thief, who has reached his home on a stormy night; the priest’s suspicious sister, who warns him not to trust a stranger, especially one who looks so desperate. The soldiers who spy the thief and raise an outcry as they vault over the sofa in our living room. I improved on the dialogue as I went along by adding long, emotional harangues. I had found my life’s vocation, I told my mother. I was going to be an actor. She smiled unhappily. (But I was used to that.)

Most of all, I enjoyed playing the part of the thief. In the middle of the night, when the priest and his sister were asleep, I would rise from my mat and, on tiptoe, reach for the gold lamp in the alcove. My face would be filled with frenzy, the face of a man calloused by the world’s cruelties. What did I care that the lamp was the priest’s one valuable possession? Fool, I sneered, as I swept it into my sack and climbed out of the window. When the commander caught me and brought me back to the priest for identification, I was unrepentant. I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned back against the wall. Do your worst, I dared them. It was only when the priest declared that he had given me the gold lamp as a gift that my face grew uncertain and my hands began to tremble. My knees grew weak until I sank, sacklike, onto my mother’s living room carpet. I lowered my head to the floor in respect and said to the priest, Forgive me, I am your servant for life. The room filled with applause from Manik and my mother. I kept my head down as long as I could. I didn’t want to return to my life.

I thought about the play a lot over the next few years, even after I’d exchanged my dream of being an actor for one of becoming a judge who presided over criminal cases, sentencing
men to death—or life. There was something about the play that kept disturbing me. It was only later, after coming across another play of a very different kind, that I realized what it was. I really liked the guy who stole the lamp, I really wanted to believe that he changed into a good man in the end—but I couldn’t. It didn’t help that our teacher told us that the story was from a novel written by a famous French author. People didn’t change from bad to good—bam!—just like that. (Every night when my father got home I had firsthand proof of it.)

I bet you’re wondering about that other play. It was
Macbeth.
We were reading it for class ten English—I’ll tell you that story another day. But there’s a scene where Lady Macbeth is trying to persuade Macbeth, who’s very loyal to the king, that he should kill him when he’s visiting their castle. Finally, even though he’s reluctant, Macbeth agrees—and that’s it for him.