Arranged Marriage: Stories (5 page)

But then the worries come.

I hardly know Aunt Pratima, my mothers younger sister with whom I am to stay while I attend college. And her husband, whom I am to call Bikram-uncle—I don’t know him at all. They left India a week after their wedding (I was eight then) and have not been back since. Aunt is not much of a letter writer; every year at Bijoya she sends us a card stating
how much she misses us, and that’s all. In response to my letter asking for permission to stay with her, she wrote back only,
yes of course, but we live very simply
.

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. All the women I know—my mother, her friends, my other aunts—are avid talkers, filling up lazy heat-hazed afternoons with long, gossipy tales while they drink tea and chew on betel leaves and laugh loud enough to scare away the
ghu-ghu
birds sleeping under the eaves. I couldn’t ask my mother—she’d been against my coming to America and would surely use that letter to strengthen her arsenal. So I told myself that was how Americans (Aunt Pratima had lived there long enough to qualify as one) expressed themselves. Economically. And that second part, about living simply—she was just being modest. We all knew that Bikram-uncle owned his own auto business.

Now I look down on the dazzle-bright clouds packed tight as snow cones, deceptively solid. (But I know they are only mist and gauze, unable to save us should an engine fail and the plane plummet downward.) I pull my blue silk sari, which I bought specially for this trip, close around me. The air feels suddenly stale, heavy with other people’s exhalations. I think,
What if Uncle and Aunt don’t like me? What if I don’t like them?
I remember the only picture I’ve seen of them, the faded sepia marriage photo where they gazed into the camera, stoic and unsmiling, their heavy garlands pulling at their necks. (Why had they never sent any other pictures?) What if they hadn’t really wanted me to come and were only being polite? (Americans, I’d heard, liked their privacy. They liked their lives to be smooth and uninterrupted by the claims of
relatives.) What if they’re not even at the airport? What if they’re there but I don’t recognize them? I imagine myself stranded, my suitcases strewn around me, the only one left in a large, echoing building after all the happily reunited families have gone home. Maybe I should have listened to Mother after all, I say to myself. Should have let her arrange that marriage for me with Aunt Sarita’s neighbor’s nephew. Saying it makes the fear something I can see and breathe, like the gray fog that hangs above the smoking section of the aircraft, where someone has placed me by mistake.

Later, of course, I will laugh at my foolishness. Aunt and Uncle are there, just as Aunt had promised, and I pick them out right away (how can I not?) from among the swirl of smart business suits and shiny leather briefcases, the elegant skirts that swing above stiletto-thin high heels.

Bikram-uncle is a short, stocky man dressed in greasy mechanic’s overalls that surprise me. He has a belligerent mustache and very dark skin and a scar that runs up the side of his neck. (Had it been hidden in the wedding photo under the garlands?) I am struck at once by how ugly he is—the garlands had hidden that as well—how unlike Aunt, who stoops a bit to match her husband’s height, her fine, nervous hands worrying the edge of her shawl as she scans the travelers emerging from Immigration.

I touch their feet like a good Indian girl should, though I am somewhat embarrassed. Everyone in the airport is watching us, I’m sure of it. Aunt is embarrassed too, and shifts her weight from leg to leg. Then she kisses me on both cheeks,
but a little hesitantly—I get the feeling she hasn’t done something like this in a long time.

“O Jayanti!” she says. “I am having no idea you are growing so beautiful. And so fair-skinned. And you such a thin thin girl with scabby knees when I left India. It is making me very happy.” Her voice is soft and uncertain, as though she rarely speaks above a whisper, but her eyes are warm, flecked with bits of light.

I don’t know what Uncle thinks. This makes me smile too widely and speak too fast and thank them too effusively for taking me in. I start to take out letters and packets from my carry-on bag.

“This is from Mother,” I tell Aunt. “This fat one wrapped in twine is from Grandfather. And here’s a jar of the lemon-mango pickle you used to like so much—Great-aunt Rama made it herself when she heard—”

Bikram-uncle interrupts. Unlike Aunt, who speaks refined Bengali, he uses a staccato American English. His accent jars my ears. I have trouble understanding it.

“Can we get going? I got to be back at work. You women can chat all day once you get home.”

His voice isn’t unkind. Still I feel reprimanded, as though I am a little girl again, and spitefully I wonder how a marriage could ever have been arranged between a man like Bikram-uncle and my aunt, who comes from an old and wealthy landowning family.

The overalls are part of the problem. They make him seem so—I hesitate to use the word, but only briefly—
low-class
. Why, even Mr. Bhalani, who owned the Lakshmi Motor Works near the Mint, always wore a starched white linen suit
and a diamond on his little finger. Now as I stare from the back of the car at the fold of neck that overlaps the grimy collar of Uncle’s overalls, I feel that something is very wrong.

But only for a moment. Outside, America is whizzing by the fogged-up car window, blurry silhouettes of brick and stone and tall black glass that glint in the sun, making me dizzy. I wipe the moisture from the pane with the edge of my sari.

‘What’s this?” I ask. “And this?”

“The central post office,” Aunt replies, laughing a little at my excitement. “The Sears Tower.” But a lot of the time she says, “I am not knowing this one.” Uncle busies himself with swerving in and out of traffic, humming along with the song on the radio.

The apartment is another disappointment, not at all what an American home should be like. I’ve seen the pictures in
Good Housekeeping
and
Sunset
at the USIS library, and once our neighbor Aditi brought over the photos her
chachaji
had sent from Akron, Ohio. I remember clearly the neat red brick house with matching flowery drapes, the huge, perfectly mowed lawn green like it had been painted, the shiny concrete driveway on which sat two shiny motorcars. And Akron isn’t even as big as Chicago. And Aditi’s
chachaji
only works in an office, selling insurance.

This apartment smells of stale curry. It is crowded with faded, overstuffed sofas and rickety end tables that look like they’ve come from a larger place. A wadded newspaper is wedged under one of the legs of the dining table. Uncle and
Aunt are watching me, his eyes defiant, hers anxious. I shift my gaze to the dingy walls hung with prints of landscapes, cattle standing under droopy weeping willows looking vaguely bored, (surely they are not Aunt’s choice?) and try to keep my face polite. My monogrammed leather cases are an embarrassment in this household. I push them under the bed in the tiny room I am to occupy—it is the same size as my bathroom at home. I remember that cool green mosaic floor, the claw-footed marble bathtub from colonial days, the large window that looks out on my mothers crimson and gold dahlias, and want to cry. But I tell Aunt that I will be very comfortable here, and I thank her for the rose she has put in a jelly jar and placed on the windowsill.

Aunt cooks happily all afternoon. Whenever I offer help she says, “No no, you just sit and rest your feet and tell me what-all’s going on at home.”

Dinner turns out to be an elaborate affair—a spicy almond-chicken curry arranged over hot rice, a spinach-lentil
dal
, a yogurt cucumber
raita
, fried potato
pakoras
, crisp golden
papads
, and sweet white
kheer
—which has taken hours to prepare—for dessert. I have a guilty feeling that Aunt and Uncle don’t usually eat this way, and as we sit down I glance at Uncle for confirmation. But he has already started on the food. He eats quickly and with concentration, without raising his head. When he wants more he points silently, and Aunt hurries to serve him. He has taken a shower and put on the muslin
kurta-pajama
I brought him as a gift from India. With his hair brushed back wetly and
chappals
on his feet, he
could be any Indian man sitting down to his dinner after a hard days work. As I watch Aunt ladle more
dal
onto his plate, I have a strange sense of disorientation, and for a moment I wonder whether I’ve left Calcutta at all.

“I think he is liking you,” whispers Aunt Pratima when we are alone in the kitchen. She stops spooning dessert into bowls to touch me lightly on the wrist, her face bright. “See how he is wearing the clothes you brought for him? Most nights he does not even change out of his overalls, let alone take a shower.”

I am dubious. Uncle’s attitude toward me, as far as I can tell, is one of testy tolerance. But I give Aunt a hug and hope, for her sake, that she is right. And as I help her pour tea into chipped cups of fine bone china that look like they might have once been part of her dowry, I make a special effort. I offer Uncle my most charming smile.

“I can’t believe I’m finally here in the U.S.,” I tell him. “I’ve heard so much about Chicago—Lake Michigan, which is surely big as an ocean, the Egyptian museum with mummies three thousand years old, and is it true that the big downtown stores have real silver mannequins in their windows?”

Uncle grunts noncommittally, regarding the teacups with disfavor. He stomps into the kitchen where I hear him rummage in the refrigerator.

“I can’t wait to see it all!” I call after him. “I’m so glad I have the summer, though of course I’m looking forward to starting at the university in September!”

“You will do well, I know.” Aunt nods encouragingly. “You are such a smart girl to be getting into this university
where people from all over the world are trying to become students. Soon you will have many many American friends, and—”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” Bikram-uncle breaks in, startling me. His voice is harsh, raspy. He stands in the kitchen doorway, drinking from a can which glints in his fist. “Things here aren’t as perfect as people at home like to think. We all thought we’d become millionaires. But it’s not so easy.”

“Please,” Aunt says, but he seems not to hear her. He tips his head back to swallow, and the scar on his neck glistens pinkly like a live thing.
Budweiser
, I read as he sets the can down, and am shocked to realize he’s drinking beer. At home in Calcutta none of the family touches alcohol, not even cousin Ramesh, who attends St. Xavier’s College and sports a navy-blue blazer and a British accent. Mother has always told me what a disgusting habit it is, and she’s right. I remember Grandfather’s village at harvesttime, the farmhands lying in ditches, drunk on palm-toddy, flies buzzing around their faces. I try not to let my distaste show on my face.

Now Uncle’s tone is dark and raw. The bitterness in it coats my mouth like the
karela
juice Mother used to give me to cool my liver.

“The Americans hate us. They’re always putting us down because we’re dark-skinned foreigners,
kala admi
. Blaming us for the damn economy, for taking away their jobs. You’ll see it for yourself soon enough.”

What has made him detest this country so much?

I look beyond Uncle’s head at the window. All I can see is a dark rectangle. But I know the sky outside is filled with
strange and beautiful stars, and I am suddenly angry with him for trying to ruin it all for me. I take a deep breath. I tell myself, I’ll wait to make up my own mind.

At night I lie in my lumpy bed under a coarse green blanket. I try to sleep, but the night noises that still seem unfamiliar after a week—the desperate
whee-whee
of a siren, the wind sighing as it coils about the house—keep me awake. Small sounds filter, too, through the walls from Aunt’s bedroom. And though they are quite innocent—the bedsprings creaking as someone turns over in sleep, footsteps and then the hum of the exhaust as the bathroom light is switched on—each time I stiffen with embarrassment. I cannot stop thinking of Uncle and Aunt. I would rather think only of Aunt, but like the shawls of the bride and groom at an Indian wedding ceremony, their lives are inextricably knotted together. I try to imagine her arriving in this country, speaking only a little English, red-veiled, wearing the heavy, elaborate jewelry I’ve seen in the wedding photo. (What happened to it all? Now Aunt only wears a thin gold chain and the tiniest of pearls in her ears.) Her shock at discovering that her husband was not the owner of an automobile empire (as the matchmaker had assured her family) but only a mechanic who had a dingy garage in an undesirable part of town.

I haven’t seen Uncle’s shop yet. Of course I haven’t seen anything else either, but as soon as the weather—which has been a bone-chilling gray—improves, I plan to. I’ve already called the people at Midwest Bus Tours, which picks up passengers
from their homes for an extra five dollars. But I have a feeling I’ll never get to see the shop, and so—again spitefully—I make it, in my head, a cheerless place that smells of sweat and grease, where the hiss of hydraulics and the clanging of tools mix with the curses of mechanics who are all as surly as Bikram-uncle.

But soon, with the self-absorption of the young, I move on the wings of imagination to more exciting matters. In my Modern Novel class at the university, I sit dressed in a plaid skirt and a matching sweater. My legs, elegant in knee-high boots like the ones I have seen on one of the afternoon TV shows that Aunt likes, are casually crossed. My bobbed hair swings around my face as I spiritedly argue against the handsome professors interpretation of Dreiser’s philosophy. I discourse brilliantly on the character of Sister Carrie until he is convinced, and later we go out for dinner to a quiet little French restaurant. Candlelight shines on the professor’s reddish hair, on his gold spectacle frames. On the rims of our wineglasses. Chopin plays in the background as he confesses his admiration, his love for me. He slips onto my finger a ring with stones that sparkle like his eyes and tells me of the trips we will go on around the world, the books we will coauthor when I am his wife. (No arranged marriage like Aunt’s for me!) After dinner he takes me to his apartment overlooking the lake, where fairy lights twinkle and shiver on the water. He pulls me down, respectfully but ardently, on the couch. His lips are hot against my throat, his …