Arranged Marriage: Stories (2 page)

The bats were a real problem. They had descended, all of a sudden, on the mango orchard, and within a day they had bitten into and ruined hundreds of mangoes. Grandpa-uncle tried everything—sticks and drums and magic powder from the wisewoman in the next village—but nothing worked. Finally he had to use poison. I never really saw how he did it because he made me stay away, but the next morning there were bat carcasses all over the orchard. We couldn’t leave them to rot, of course, so Grandpa-uncle went around with a big jute sack and picked them up. I went along and pointed them out to him with a stick. He said I was a good helper, that without me he never would have managed to spot them all with his failing eyes.

You would have thought that after the first week the bats would have figured it out and found another place to live. But no. Every morning there were just as many dead bodies. I asked Grandpa-uncle about this. He shook his head and said he didn’t understand either.

“I guess they just don’t realize what’s happening. They don’t realize that by flying somewhere else they’ll be safe. Or maybe they do, but there’s something that keeps pulling them back here.” I wanted to ask him what that something was, but just then I found a real whopper lying under the hibiscus bush, all purply-black and crinkled up, the biggest I had ever seen, and forgot about my question.

Maybe the bats did catch on, because a few days later we found only about ten bodies, and only three the next day. Grandpa-uncle was even more pleased than I was. I knew how much he hated the job because of how he grimaced each time he bent over to pick up a carcass and how there was a white,
pinched look about his mouth by the time the sack was full. He said we would celebrate by going fishing at Kalodighi, the big lake which was all the way at the other end of the village.

We started early the next day, while the tall grasses next to the meadow path were still bent over and sparkly with dew. Grandpa-uncle carried the poles, the little tin bucket filled with worms he had collected at dawn, and a knife to gut the fish we caught. I held tight to the knotted cloth in which Mother had packed
chapatis
and potato curry for our lunch, and some
sandesh
made with new jaggery as a special dessert treat. From time to time I gave little skips of excitement, because though I’d heard a lot about Kalodighi, where the water was so deep that it looked black, and where the best and biggest fish were to be found, Grandpa-uncle hadn’t taken me there yet. Maybe, I thought, today I would finally catch such a big fish that Grandpa-uncle and Mother would be really proud of me.

When I saw the waters of Kalodighi stretching all the way to the horizon, shiny and black just like Grandpa-uncle said it would be, I knew it had to be the largest lake in the entire world. Near the shore there were little ripples, but in the middle of the lake the water lay quiet and powerful, deep beyond imagining.

“Kind of like there’s a mystery hiding in there,” I whispered hesitantly to Grandpa-uncle, afraid he wouldn’t understand, but he nodded and whispered back that he knew exactly what I meant. We sat in silence under the broad reddish-green leaves of a plantain tree and watched the water for a
while. Dragonflies flitted from lotus leaf to lotus leaf, the scent of
champa
blossoms lay lightly on the air, I leaned my head against Grandpa-uncle’s shirt with its pungent tobacco smell, and my whole chest ached with the wish that I could spend the rest of my life just like this.

But soon it was time for lunch. We ate the soft
chapatis
and the spicy
alu
curry that I loved even though it made my eyes water, and the sweet balls of
sandesh
melted on my tongue, just as I knew they would. We cupped the cool lake water in our hands and drank, and it was even sweeter than the
sandesh
.

“Next week I’m going to start teaching you to swim,” said Grandpa-uncle as he set up his fishing rod. He laughed at the excitement flooding my face. I’d asked and asked him for swimming lessons, but before today he’d always said no. “I figured I’d better do it before I get too old,” he added in explanation.

I knew he was joking because he could never get too old, and I told him so, but he only smiled and rubbed at his chest the way he often did and told me to mind my rod.

The rest of the afternoon we fished—or rather we sat waiting with our poles for the sleeping fish to wake and bite, and though I was unlucky as always, when the sun hung above the lake as red as the marriage
bindi
on Mother’s forehead, Grandpa-uncle caught a great
rui
fish that sent up sprays of rainbow water as it leaped and thrashed at the end of his line. When he cut its stomach open, there was a silver ring inside. Grandpa-uncle didn’t say anything, but I could tell that even he was excited. As he washed it in the lake, the thick band
with words carved on it in a language that neither of us could read glinted in the dark water.

“This must be the magic ring of the sorcerer of Kalodighi, the one that grants all wishes,” he said, holding it out to me. “See the ancient spell carved onto it? One day when the sorcerer lay sleeping in his silken pleasure boat, his hand trailing in the cool water, a
rui
fish came up and bit off his ring finger….”

“Grandpa-uncle!” I protested, looking at him sharply to see if he had a twinkle in his eye like when he told me tales of witches and water fairies,

“Everyone knows the story,” he said, slipping the ring into the pocket of his
kurta
and nodding at me seriously. “If you don’t believe me, ask your mother when we get home.”

But when we reached home that evening, I had no chance to ask Mother anything. She was waiting for us on the porch, holding on to an envelope, which surprised me because we never got any letters.

“It’s from him,” she said in answer to the question in our eyes. “He wants us to come back. He promises it won’t happen again.”

The tin bucket fell from Grandpa-uncle’s hand and clattered noisily over the steps. He sat down heavily, leaning against the mud wall. “How did he know where you were?”

Mother looked away. She was gripping the envelope so tightly that the tips of her fingernails were white. “I wrote to him.” And then, defensively, “I couldn’t stand it, the stares
and whispers of the women, down in the marketplace. The loneliness of being without him.”

Grandpa-uncle looked up and saw me watching, and fished around in his
kurta
pocket for a coin. He asked me if I would go get him some tobacco from Kesto’s shop. I ran all the way there and back, but by that time they had finished discussing the matter, and Mother told me that I should go to bed early as we would be leaving next morning.

“But I can’t leave now! Grandpa-uncle is going to teach me to swim!”

She had a vague smile on her face and I could tell she wasn’t really listening. I had to say it a couple more times, and then she replied that I could join a swimming class once we were back in Calcutta.

“I don’t want a swimming class! I want Grandpa-uncle!” I kicked at our bags which she had packed even before Grandpa-uncle and I had returned from the lake. I tried to find words for all the things boiling up inside me. But all I could shout was “I hate you! I hate you!”

Grandpa-uncle took me outside and told me that I mustn’t talk to Mother that way, that she had many troubles and that I must be an especially good daughter to her and help take care of her. He held me on his lap and stroked my hair as he talked, as though I were a baby, and I didn’t protest like I normally would have. Then, until dinnertime, he pointed out the different stars and told me their stories. He showed me the black warrior with his sword, the seven wise men who can tell when the end of the world will be, and the Dhruva star named for the little boy who went into the forest and met God.

Late in the night a sound woke me. At first I thought it was Mother, crying again, but then I realized it was coming from the alcove where Grandpa-uncle slept ever since he gave us his bedroom. I tiptoed over and he was lying with his
kurta
unbuttoned, rubbing at his chest, breathing heavily, trying to be silent.

“Where does it hurt, Grandpa-uncle?”

He pointed to his chest and I rubbed it for a while, feeling the crisp white curly hairs under my palm. Then he said he felt much better and made me go back to bed so that Mother wouldn’t wake up.

“Don’t tell her anything,” he whispered when I was at the door. “She’ll just worry.”

The next morning he looked as good as ever, so that I wondered if I had dreamed it all. He carried our bags to the station and blessed us when we touched his feet, and just before we left he slipped something wrapped in a piece of cloth into my palm.

“Don’t open it till you’re on the train,” he said in my ear. Then, straightening up, “the next time you’re here we’ll go swimming together.”

“That’s right,” Mother said, smiling at me, “and you’ll be able to show Uncle how well you learned to swim.”

Her eyes were all shiny and lit up, so I nodded and tried to smile back although my lips felt stiff and dry, their edges ready to crack, like leather
chappals
left too long in the sun.

Now the train was moving. Grandpa-uncle waved at us from the platform and I waved back, craning my neck through the window so I could see him as long as possible, even though Mother warned me I would get coal dust in my eyes.

“I don’t know why you’re carrying on like this,” she said a bit irritably when I finally sat down.
“We’ll
come to see him—all three of us—next
puja
vacation.”

I wanted to tell her how, as the train picked up speed, Grandpa-uncle had become smaller and smaller until he was no bigger than a matchstick doll. And then he had disappeared. But Mother was frowning, biting at her lower lip and rummaging through her purse for something, so I didn’t say it. Instead, I looked up at the sky. It was full of monsoon clouds, black and crinkly like bats’ wings. That was when I knew she had deceived me, that nothing was going to happen the way she said it would.

I turned to face her, the anger thick and hot as melted metal filling my arms and legs, rising from my stomach into my throat so I could spit it out at her. I gathered my breath for it. But when I saw her eyes, wide like a little girl’s as she reread the letter, I realized she hadn’t been lying on purpose. She just didn’t
know
the way I did.

The compartment seemed to turn end over end in slow motion, so that I had to lean back into the hard wooden bench. Everything I stared at—bunks, suitcases, windows, sky—appeared to be upside down. Would they ever right themselves again?

“I told you all that coal dust would make you sick,” Mother said, an edge of satisfaction beneath the concern in her voice. “Here, you’d better take some
amchur.”

I silently put a pinch of the sour grains under my tongue. When Mother was busy with the letter once more, I went back to the window and leaned my forehead against its rusty bars. And as I waited for the velvet-green fields of young rice
to turn back into city walls crusted with soot and graffiti and spat-out wads of betel leaf, I held the packet Grandpa-uncle had given me tight in my fist. I didn’t need to open it. I knew already what was inside.

I kept it for a long time, the silver ring from our fish, secreted in the bottom of an underwear drawer, or in the pocket of a dusty suitcase. I changed its hiding place often so that Mother would not find it and ask questions. Not that she would have—she had more serious things to worry about. From time to time, when things got bad, I would shut myself in my room, take out the ring, and hold it in my hand until the cool metal grew blood-warm. I would run my finger over the runes, wishing I could speak the spell to take me back to that day at the lake with Grandpa-uncle. Sometimes I pressed it to my lips and whispered words I had memorized from books about magic that I borrowed from the library. But none of them ever worked, so perhaps it was not a magic ring at all. Still, I took it wherever Mother and I moved, even when we had to travel real light, real quick. I never knew what Father would do to the things we left behind. One time he burned them. One time he threw them all in the rubbish heap. When we returned he bought us everything new, shiny-bright, as though the past were only a word, with no real meaning to it.

Then once we had to leave in the middle of the night, too suddenly to take anything with us. Mother stumbled behind me down the lightless passage—we hadn’t dared to switch on the light—holding the wadded end of her sari to her face, the blood seeping through its white like a dark, crumpled
flower. I pulled at her hand to hurry her along, my own shoulder still throbbing from when Father had flung me against the wall as I tried to stop him. When we came back a few weeks later (this time even before our bruises had faded all the way) I looked for the ring everywhere. But it was gone.

CLOTHES

T
HE WATER OF THE WOMEN’S LAKE LAPS AGAINST MY
breasts, cool, calming. I can feel it beginning to wash the hot nervousness away from my body. The little waves tickle my armpits, make my sari float up around me, wet and yellow, like a sunflower after rain. I close my eyes and smell the sweet brown odor of the
ritha
pulp my friends Deepali and Radha are working into my hair so it will glisten with little lights this evening. They scrub with more vigor than usual and wash it out more carefully, because today is a special day. It is the day of my bride-viewing.