Arranged Marriage: Stories (28 page)

The couple were walking along the edge of a swimming pool now, tall and unself-conscious, while the reflected light from the water shimmered over their nakedness. The woman dived into the pool and the man followed. Unhindered by clothing, their limbs cut cleanly through the blue, and when they came together bubbles broke and rose around them like silver beads. I knew intuitively that they weren’t married. Their mouths and hands explored the curves and hollows of each other’s bodies with a frank delight that was very different from our awkward, furtive movements in the darkened bedroom. When the man’s lips closed around the tight pinkness of the woman’s nipple, I watched carefully. A part of me was surprised that I felt none of the shame that would have ordinarily overwhelmed me. Perhaps the dim blue swirl of water in which they rocked, suspended, gave the act a softness, a sense of surreality. Or perhaps shame is something you feel only when someone is watching you watch. When the man’s head moved lower to the half-moon of her navel, and then lower still, I clenched my fists and leaned forward. My nails dug into my palms, hard, like hers were digging into his shoulders. And when her body arched upward, shuddering, my body too gave an answering shudder.

Later I lay in bed, listening to Ashok breathe, thinking. Had I been wrong all this time, when I refused to let him turn the lights on as we made love, when I lay stiff and submissive under his thrusts until he was done with it? When I escaped thankfully to the bathroom to wash myself as soon as he
moved off me? Had my mother, too, been wrong when, the night before my wedding, she had explained to me that a good wife’s duty was to allow her husband to satisfy himself no matter how unpleasant she found it? For the first time I wondered how happy my father had been with her, and she with him.

I watched the dark line of Ashok’s shoulder and remembered. Early in our marriage, once or twice, he’d suggested doing things differently, trying something new. He’d even bought a book—
The Joy of Sex
, I think it was called—and shown it to me almost shyly. But I’d reacted with such undisguised horror that he hadn’t brought it up again.

Was that when he started turning his acid humor on me?

I put out a hesitant hand to touch his throat. His skin was warm and supple, and when I brought my face to it, it smelled of musk and maleness. Ashok muttered in his sleep, a word I couldn’t catch. He made a brushing-off movement, as one might with a mosquito. The back of his hand struck my mouth as he turned away.

That night I dreamed of a man and woman underwater. I knew right away that it wasn’t the couple in the movie. They ran their hands along each other’s bodies with feverish haste, their muscles straining as though it was their first time together. When the swirling blue cleared and the man finally lifted his mouth from the dark patch of woman-hair fine and wavy as water grass, I saw that it was Ashok. I drew him up, up, and pulled him hard into my hips. We came together, my legs wrapped tight around him, bubbles exploding into crystal fragments around us. And then I saw my face, the way you do in dreams. It was blind with ecstasy, my mouth open in a
soundless, triumphant cry, my hair spreading around my head, black and wild and maenadic. Only it wasn’t my face. It was Meena’s.

I noticed her as soon as I stepped into the Taj restaurant, where Kuldeep and Saroj were holding their tenth anniversary celebration. How could I not? In her sheer orange chiffon sari she flamed in the center of the banquet hall, and the men gathered around her, wearing the dark, conservative suits that successful Indians favored, seemed like bemused moths. Srikant was nowhere in sight.

“My, is that a backless
choli
she’s wearing?” said Ashok. “Your friend’s grown quite reckless, wouldn’t you say? Maybe it’s the effect of the affair….”

I didn’t respond. The
choli
was, indeed, very backless. I got a good view of it as Meena turned to accept a drink that someone was holding out to her. Nothing except a couple of golden strings held it together. Beside me, Ashok gave a low, approving whistle.

In spite of myself I was shocked. And furious with Meena for her foolishness. Didn’t she know that every woman in the room would be whispering about that
choli?
I could already hear the comments.

Indecent
.

Where on earth did she get such a thing? And to have the boldness to wear it here
.

If I were her husband, I’d tell her a thing or two
.

Tell! My dear, it’s not telling she needs. It’s a good beating
.

Talk of this kind was the last thing Meena, who already had a reputation for being different and a little dangerous, could afford. Especially now.

So what? said a small voice inside me. Why are
you
so concerned with what they think of Meena? Why do you feel like you have to protect her?

I didn’t have an answer to that. I guess it was something I’d always done. Perhaps it was because, in spite of her worldliness, Meena understood our Indian friends far less than I did.

The men, for example, even the ones clustered around her, laughing at her jokes, they too would have things to say about her in the privacy of the men’s room, things followed by winks and lewd, derisive laughter. For in spite of their Bill Blass suits and alligator-skin shoes and the sleek Benzes that waited obediently for them in the parking lots, they still belonged to the villages of their fathers. Villages where a woman caught in adultery was made to ride around the market square on a donkey, her head shaved, her clothes stripped off her, while crowds jeered and pelted her with garbage.

“Abha dear, here you are finally!”

Startled, I whirled around. I hadn’t noticed Meena leaving her group of admirers. Now she leaned forward to give me—and then Ashok—a kiss on the cheek. It was not something Indians did as a rule—but then that was Meena. I watched her bright lips grazing my husband’s cheek and his smile as he whispered something in her ear, and I remembered my dream.

“Abha, you’re not listening!”

It took me a moment to focus on Meena’s animated face.

“They’re going to have dancing before dinner. It’s going to start in a few minutes. Isn’t that something!”

I nodded as I watched two men wheel in assorted stereo equipment and put up strobe lights on stands and hang mirrored spheres from the ceiling. Dancing was uncommon at Indian parties, at least among our friends, whose idea of a good time consisted mostly of a bottle of Johnnie Walker and a plateful of
biriyani
, with some spicy gossip on the side.

“Kuldeep and Saroj are going all out to make an impression, aren’t they?” Meena said, her eyes sparkling, her foot already tapping.

“And all this for their tenth anniversary! I wonder what they’ll do for their twentieth!” said Ashok.

“That’s if they’re still together,” I said dryly.

Meena and Ashok both turned and looked at me. They weren’t used to hearing me talk like that.

“My, we’re getting cynical,” said Ashok. Then he turned back to Meena and gave her an elaborate bow. “May I have the first dance, ma’am?”

“Of course!” Meena’s laugh was like a flock of white birds flying up into the sky all at once. “That is, if Abha doesn’t mind?”

I felt a stab of disappointment. I wasn’t a dancer. Still, it would have been nice if my husband had asked
me
first.

By the time I’d pulled myself together sufficiently to say it was fine with me, Ashok and Meena were gone.

I leaned against the wall and looked on as he drew her to
the middle of the surprisingly crowded floor. Maybe it was the novelty of it that made people eager to dance. Or maybe it was that the large chandelier lights had been replaced by semidarkness.

The first song was a fast number, a hit from a recent Hindi film. Under the pulsing of the strobes, the movements of the dancers took on a fragmented, disembodied quality, and faces I’d known for years looked like those of strangers. But there was no mistaking Ashok and Meena. They were without a doubt the most graceful pair on the floor. The other couples, brought up in a culture of sitar and
tabla
and years of warnings that nice girls didn’t move their bodies like
that
, tried valiantly to follow the beat. But their elbows and knees stuck out at stiff, ungainly angles, and when they shook their hips and behinds, it was in an uncomfortable caricature of the film stars they had watched on their VCRs. I wondered what they thought as they watched Ashok and Meena glide by, their faces illuminated by the silver light from the revolving spheres overhead. When he spun her around, Travolta-like, until she ended up in his arms, her hair tangling around his throat like a live thing, were their eyes dazzled, like mine, by the flash and glitter of the gold strings of that backless
choli?

No
, I whispered to myself. He wouldn’t have said anything to me if
he
was the one Meena was having the affair with. But my voice, weak and unconvinced, was drowned by the clamor inside my head.
Yes, yes, yes. It would be the perfect victory, the perfect revenge for all those sexless, love-less years
.

For that was what I came to realize in the banquet hall of the Taj with the broken light from the mirrored spheres
lying around me: I hadn’t loved Ashok all these years, not really, though I believed I had. I’d been too busy being a good wife.

“Hope I’m not disturbing you, Abha.” It was Srikant, carrying a glass of 7-Up. “I thought you might like something to drink.”

“Thanks,” I said, attempting a smile. It was just like him, considerate, to remember that I didn’t drink alcohol. “How about yourself?”

“I’ve had enough,” he said, leaning back by me against the wall, and when I turned to ask him where he’d been all this time, I smelled the raw whiff of it on his breath. It surprised me because Srikant, too, hardly ever drinks.

“They look good together, don’t they?” he said, ignoring my question.

A slow love song was playing now. Meena and Ashok moved fluidly among husbands and wives who held each other at awkward arm’s length, as they had been taught. He lowered his head to say something to her, and as she looked up to reply, it seemed to me her cheek rested for a moment on his shoulder. They didn’t glance toward us. Not once.

“They do,” I said heavily, watching my husband’s hand on the bare skin of my best friend’s back.

“You know, I’m going to India,” said Srikant.

I tried, for his sake, to show some interest. “Really! Meena didn’t say anything. When are you folks leaving?”

“Next week. My mother’s not well. I’m going alone.”

“Meena isn’t coming with you?”

“No. There’s no point to it.”

“What do you mean?” I said, my voice sharp and too high. Did he, too, know something I didn’t?

But all he said was, “She’s doing so well at work, and it’s their busiest season. I don’t want to drag her away.”

Leaning close to the mirror in the ladies’ room, where we were alone for the moment, Meena touched up her lipstick—the same flame-orange as her sari—with a deft hand. She examined her eye shadow and blusher critically, then turned to me.

“Do I look OK?”

“You look fine.”

In spite of all the dancing, it seemed like Meena had just arrived at the party, her hair freshly styled, her clothes un-wrinkled. She wasn’t even sweating. I’d just stood against the wall drinking 7-Up, but my
kurta
, a modest, high-necked affair, had damp patches under the arms. My mouth was smudged and my hair, shampooed just this morning, hung limply about my face. I pulled out my lipstick, though all I wanted to do was go home and go to bed.

“Not like
that,”
Meena said. “Don’t scrape it across your mouth as if it’s a stick of crayon. Here, let me do it for you.”

Before I could say no, she’d taken the tube from me. She filled in my lips with one smooth stroke, then took a little of the lipstick on her finger and rubbed it onto my cheek-bones. Her touch was soft, the brush of a bird’s wing. Did her hands move over her lover’s body—Ashok’s body?—with the same lightness? The thought made me want to weep.

‘What is it, Abha?”

“Nothing.” I tried to keep my voice steady, to look past her at the Taj Mahal poster hanging on the wall, where under a huge golden moon a man and a woman stood holding hands and looking at the majestic marble structure that symbolized eternal love.

“You’re upset about something. Tell me.”

I shook my head. “We should get back to our table—they must have served dinner already.”

“Is it my
choli?”

“You want to dress like that, it’s your business.”

Meena smiled faintly. “I knew you wouldn’t like it—but I wanted something different. I was so tired of doing the same things, the
proper
things….”

Is that why you’re having an affair?
I wanted to spit out. But I couldn’t. I’d been too well trained, all my life, in holding in anger and heartbreak.

“Are you mad because I danced with Ashok?”

As we’d walked from the dance floor to our table, Ashok had said, “That was great, Meena. How about some more after dinner?”

“Maybe Abha would like to dance this time.”

“Oh, you know Abha, she
never
dances.”

The dismissive sureness of his tone had made me furious.
Yes, I want to dance
, I’d almost said. But I knew I’d only embarrass us both on the floor with my stumbling stiffness.

You stay away from my husband
, I wanted to scream at Meena now.

“He’s just a good friend, you know that, don’t you?” Meena said, looking at me closely. In the flickering neon tube
lights of the ladies’ room, her irises were a deep purple-black flecked with gold.

“How is it that you don’t tell me what’s going on in your life anymore?” I blurted out.

“What do you mean?”

I looked at the surprise on her face. It seemed so genuine, the wide eyes so distressed, I was ashamed. Maybe Ashok had lied after all.