Arranged Marriage: Stories (21 page)

Where was she now? And with whom? Because surely she couldn’t manage on her own. He’d always thought her to be like the delicate purple passion-flower vines that they’d put up on trellises along their back fence, and once, early in the marriage, had presented her with a poem he’d written about this. He remembered how, when he held out the sheet to her, she’d stared at him for a long moment and a look he couldn’t quite read had flickered in her eyes. Then she’d taken the poem with a small smile. He went over and over all the men she might have known, but they (mostly his Indian friends) were safely married and still at home, every one.

The bed felt hot and lumpy. He tossed his feverish body around like a caught animal, punched the pillow, threw the blanket to the floor. Even thought, for a wild moment, of shaking the boy awake and asking him,
Who did your mama see?
And as though he had an inbuilt antenna that picked up his father’s agitation, in the next room the boy started crying
(which he hadn’t done for months), shrill screams that left him breathless. And when his father and grandmother rushed to see what the problem was, he pushed them from him with all the strength in his small arms, saying, Go way, don’t want you, want Mama, want Mama.

After the boy had been dosed with gripe water and settled in bed again, the husband sat alone in the family room with a glass of brandy. He wasn’t a drinker. He believed that alcohol was for weak men. But somehow he couldn’t face the rumpled bed just yet, the pillows wrested onto the floor. The unknown areas of his wife’s existence yawning blackly around him like chasms. Should he tell the police, he wondered, would it do any good? What if somehow his friends came to know?
Didn’t I tell you, right from the first
, his mother would say. And anyway it was possible she was already dead, killed by a stranger from whom she’d hitched a ride, or by a violent, jealous lover. He felt a small, bitter pleasure at the thought, and then a pang of shame.

Nevertheless he made his way to the dark bedroom (a trifle unsteadily; the drink had made him light-headed) and groped in the bottom drawer beneath his underwear until he felt the coarse manila envelope with her photos. He drew it out and, without looking at them, tore the pictures into tiny pieces. Then he took them over to the kitchen, where the trash compactor was.

The roar of the compactor seemed to shake the entire house. He stiffened, afraid his mother would wake and ask what was going on, but she didn’t. When the machine ground to a halt, he took a long breath. Finished, he thought. Finished.
Tomorrow he would contact a lawyer, find out the legal procedure for remarriage. Over dinner he would mention to his mother, casually, that it was OK with him if she wanted to contact second aunt. Only this time he didn’t want a college-educated woman. Even good looks weren’t that important. A simple girl, maybe from their ancestral village. Someone whose family wasn’t well off, who would be suitably appreciative of the comforts he could provide. Someone who would be a real mother to his boy.

He didn’t know then that it wasn’t finished. That even as he made love to his new wife (a plump, cheerful girl, good-hearted, if slightly unimaginative), or helped his daughters with their homework, or disciplined his increasingly rebellious son, he would wonder about
her
. Was she alive? Was she happy? With a sudden anger that he knew to be irrational, he would try to imagine her body tangled in swaying kelp at the bottom of the ocean where it had been flung. Bloated. Eaten by fish. But all he could conjure up was the intent look on her face when she rocked her son back and forth, singing a children’s rhyme in Bengali,
Khoka jabe biye korte, shonge chhasho dhol, my little boy is going to be married, six hundred drummers
. Years later, when he was an old man living in a home for seniors (his second wife dead, his daughters moved away to distant towns, his son not on speaking terms with him), he would continue to be dazzled by that brief unguarded joy in her face, would say to himself, again, how much she must have hated me to choose to give
that
up.

But he had no inkling of any of this yet. So he switched off the trash compactor with a satisfied click, the sense of a job
well done and, after taking a shower (long and very hot, the way he liked it, the hard jets of water turning the skin of his chest a dull red), went to bed and fell immediately into a deep, dreamless sleep.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENT:
My thanks to Claudine Ward, whose story “Fugue” inspired this one
.

DOORS

I
T ALL STARTED WHEN
R
AJ CAME TO LIVE WITH THEM
.

But no, not really. There had been signs of trouble even earlier. Maybe that was why Preeti’s mother had kept warning her right up to the time of the marriage.

“It’ll never work, I tell you,” she had declared gloomily as she placed a neatly folded pile of shimmery
dupattas
in the suitcase Preeti would be taking back to Berkeley with her after the wedding. “Here you are, living in the U.S. since you were twelve. And Deepak—he’s straight out of India. Just because you took a few classes together at the university, and you liked how he talks, doesn’t mean that you can live with him.”

“Please, Ma!” Preeti paused halfway through emptying out her makeup drawer. “We’ve been over this a hundred times. Don’t you think it’s time to stop, considering the fact the wedding’s tomorrow?”

“It’s never too late to stop yourself from ruining your life,” her mother said. “What do you
really
know about how Indian men think? About what they expect from their women?”

“Now don’t start on that again. You and Dad have had a happy enough marriage the last twenty-four years, haven’t you?”

“Your father’s not like the others….”

“Nor is Deepak.”

“And besides, he’s mellowed over the years. You should have seen him when we first got married.”

“Well, I’m sure with all the training you’ve given me, I’ll be able to mellow Deepak in no time!”

“That’s
your problem!” Preeti’s mother flared. “Making a joke of everything, thinking the world will always let you have your own way. I wish I
had
trained you better, like my mother did me, to be obedient and adjusting and forgiving. You’re going to need it.”

“Is this the same mother who was always at me to marry a nice Indian boy! The one who introduced me to all her friends’ sons whenever I came home from college!”

“They were all brought up here, like you.” Her mother refused to be charmed. “Not with a set of prehistoric values.”

“Mom! Deepak is the most enlightened man I know!” Preeti spoke lightly, trying to push down her rising anger because she knew her mother’s concern came from love.

“I want you to know you always have a home with us.” Preeti’s mother lowered the lid of the suitcase with a sigh, as though she were closing up a coffin.

“Enough of all this doom and gloom!” Preeti had given her mother a determined hug, though deep down she felt a twinge of fear at her ominous tone. “Let’s not argue anymore, OK? Deepak and I love each other. We’ll manage just fine.”

Deepak’s Indian friends had also been concerned when he’d met them at the International House Cafe to share the good news.

“Yaar
, are you sure you’re doing the right thing?” one of them had asked, staring down at the wedding invitation Deepak had handed him. “She’s been here so long it’s almost like she was born in this country. And you know how these ‘American’ women are, always bossing you, always thinking about themselves. …”

“It’s no wonder we call them ABCDs—American-Born-Confused-Desis,” quipped another friend as he took a swallow of beer.

“Preeti’s different!” Deepak said angrily. “You know that—you’ve all met her many times. She’s smart and serious and considerate….”

“Me,” said a third young man, adjusting his spectacles, “I’d go for an arranged marriage from back home any day, a pretty young girl from my parents’ village, not too educated, brought up to treat a man right and not talk back….”

“I can’t believe you said that!” Deepak stood up so abruptly that his chair fell over with a crash. “Women aren’t dolls or slaves. I
want
Preeti to make her own decisions. I’m proud that she’s able to.”

“Calm down, Deepak-bhai, we’re only trying to help!
We don’t want you to end up with a broken marriage a few years down the road …” someone protested.

“Our marriage isn’t going to break up. It’s going to be stronger than any traditional marriage because it’s based on mutual respect,” Deepak had flung over his shoulder as he walked out of the cafe.

On the whole it seemed that Preeti and Deepak had been right. They had lived together amicably for the last three years, at first in a tiny student apartment in Berkeley and then, after Deepak got a job with a computer firm, in a condominium in Milpitas. Preeti, who was still working on her dissertation, hadn’t been too enthusiastic about moving to the suburbs, but she’d given in when Deepak pointed out how difficult his commute had become. And it was true, like he said, that she only had to come to campus a couple times a week to teach. In return he left all the decorating to her, letting her fill the rooms with secondhand shelves crammed with books, comfortable old couches and cushions piled on the floor, a worn Persian rug and multicolored wall hangings woven by a women’s art co-op to which her friend Cathy belonged. He himself would have preferred to buy, on the Sears Home Improvement Plan, a brand-new sofa set (complete with shiny oak-finish end tables) and curtains that matched the bedspreads, but he figured that the house was her domain.

When finally, having settled in, they gave a housewarming party, all their friends had to admit that Deepak and Preeti had a fine marriage.

“Did you try some of those delicious
gulabjamuns
she fixed?” said one young man to another as they left. “Deepak sure lucked out, didn’t he?”

“Yes, and did you hear how she got the Student of the Year award in her department? Pretty soon she’ll land a cushy teaching job and start bringing in a fat paycheck as well!” replied the other, sighing enviously.

Preeti’s Indian girlfriends were amazed at Deepak’s helpfulness. “I can’t believe it!” one exclaimed. “He actually knows where the kitchen is. That’s more than my brothers do.”

“Did you see how he refilled her plate for her and brought her her drink?” said another. “And his talk—it’s always,
Preeti-this
and
Preeti-that
. Maybe I
should
let my mother arrange my marriage with her sister-in-law’s second cousin’s son in Delhi, like she’s been wanting to.”

Even Cathy, who wasn’t easily impressed, pulled Preeti aside just before she left. “I must admit I had my doubts in the beginning, though I didn’t want to say anything—your mother was already being so negative. Just like her I thought he’d turn out to be terribly chauvinistic, like other men I’ve seen from the old countries. And of course I know how stubborn and closemouthed
you
are! But I think you’ve both adjusted wonderfully. At the risk of sounding clichéd, I’d say you’re a perfectly matched couple!”

“What was Cathy saying?” Deepak asked later, after all the guests had left. They were at the sink, she washing, he drying.

“She thinks we’re a perfectly matched couple!” Preeti’s
face glowed with pleasure as she rinsed a set of mugs. Cathy’s comments meant a lot to her.

“Funny, that’s what my friend Suresh said, too.”

“Maybe they’re right!”

“I think we should check it out—right now.” Deepak dropped the towel and reached for her with a grin. “The dishes can wait till tomorrow.”

None of the guests had known, of course, about the matter of doors.

Deepak liked to leave them open, and Preeti liked them closed.

Deepak had laughed about it at first, early in the marriage.

“Are the pots and pans from the kitchen going to come and watch us making love?” he would joke when she meticulously shut the bedroom door at night although there were just the two of them in the house. Or, “Do you think I’m going to come in and attack you?” when she locked the bathroom door behind her with an audible click. He himself always bathed with the door open, song and steam pouring out of the bathroom with equal abandon.

But soon he realized that it was not a laughing matter with her. Preeti would shut the study door before settling down with her Ph.D. dissertation. When in the garden, she would make sure the gate was securely fastened as she weeded. If there had been a door to the kitchen, she would have closed it as she cooked.

Deepak was puzzled by all this door shutting. He had
grown up in a large family, and although they had been affluent enough to possess three bedrooms—one for Father, one for Mother and his two sisters, and the third for the three boys—they had never observed boundaries. They had constantly spilled into each others rooms, doors always left open for chance remarks and jokes.

He asked Preeti about it one night just before bed, when she came out of the bathroom where she always went to change into her nightie. She wasn’t able to give him an answer.