Before We Visit the Goddess

Epigraph

Fortunate Lamp: 1995

The Assam Incident: 1963

American Life: 1998

Durga Sweets: 1965-1995

Beggars Can't Be Choosers: 1973

Before We Visit the Goddess: 2002

Bela's Kitchen: 2000

Medical History: 2015

A Thousand Words: 2020

Acknowledgments

About Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

To my three men:

Murthy, Anand, and Abhay

Yatra naaryasto poojyantay, ramantay tatra devata.

(Where women are honored, there the gods are pleased.)

—Manusmriti 3/56, 100
CE

Everybody lives two ways. The first is simple, the second less so.

—“Fire Dreams,” Jean Thompson

S
omewhere in the dark, jackals are howling. They like it when storms bring down the electric lines in the village, leaving only broken bits of moonlight. Maybe they have a blood-memory of how it was before humans came and pushed them to the edges.

By now Sabitri is usually asleep. The doctor has warned her that she needs to keep regular hours. Her heart isn't doing too well, and there's the blood pressure, too. Did she want to be bedridden and force-fed barley water? Did she want him to phone her daughter in Houston? Or Bipin Bihari Ghatak, her business manager who lived in Kolkata?

No, she did not. Bela would rant, which was her default state when besieged by guilt, and Bipin Bihari, who was her oldest friend, would go silent with worry because he hadn't ever wanted Sabitri to move back to her ancestral village, so far from Kolkata, in her retirement. The savage lands, he termed it.

She sets out pen and paper on the rickety dining table next to the kerosene lamp. She takes care not to wake Rekha, snoring on her coir mat in the alcove, because then she'll start scolding, the way longtime servants feel they're entitled to.

The evening had started well, with her perched on the windowsill, watching sheets of rain blotting out the world. Gashes of lightning tore open the sky. Behind her Rekha wrung her hands.
Let me shut the window. The rain will make all the bedclothes damp, the quilts will turn moldy, you'll get the pneumonia again, and then what will we do?
But Sabitri refused. She loved the smell of night rain: wet earth, darkness, but also something else, nameless and a little frightening. When she was young, no one could keep her indoors at times like this. Even now, after she had grown brittle and creaky, the storm tugged at her insides. Ah, but Bipin Bihari should have seen her tonight!

The phone rang. She wasn't going to pick it up. That's what she had bought that fancy expensive answering machine for. But then there was Bela's voice, ragged. She'd been crying. What is it about children? An old need twisted in Sabitri's chest.
Protect, protect
. She lunged unwisely across the dark and banged her knee; pain shot down her leg like a fire.

“What happened?” she called into the receiver, her voice sounding rough and angry, though she had not meant it to come out like that. Even now Bela had this effect on her.

But Bela, preoccupied as she often was by her own drama, didn't seem to notice. She rushed into her tale. Tara was thinking of dropping out of college, they had to stop her, she'd only completed one semester, it would be the worst mistake of her life, the girl refused to listen to Bela, she never listened to anything her mother said nowadays.

Sabitri hid her concern. Sympathy would only make Bela cry more.

“I'm sorry to hear this.” But how cold and unfeeling she sounded.

“You've got to write to her, Ma! You're the grandmother. If you stress the right things, point out the dangers of her stupid choice, perhaps it'll stop Tara from ruining her life!”

Sabitri wanted to remind Bela that she had tried all of the above with her. What good had it done? Besides, Tara had never even seen Sabitri. Every time Sabitri had asked Bela to bring her to India, Bela had an excuse ready. Almost as though she—or maybe that husband of hers, that Sanjay—felt Sabitri would be a bad influence.

The years had taught Sabitri to keep such thoughts to herself. She said, instead, “What made Tara want to drop out? She's such a good student.”

When she didn't receive an answer, she continued, “Has Tara's father talked to her about this? There's a better chance of her listening to him than to me. Aren't they really close?”

Silence at the other end, more distressing than any amount of weeping. Then Bela said, “Tara isn't talking to Sanjay at the moment.”

Something else was wrong, something worse than Tara aborting her studies, which in America, Sabitri had heard, could easily be picked up again. Sabitri suddenly felt much older than her sixty-seven years. She didn't have the strength to question Bela. What was the use of questions, anyway? Already she knew the most important thing: if her daughter—proud, stubborn, so like herself—had had anyone else to turn to, she would never have called Sabitri for help.

She wrote down, carefully, the college dorm address that Bela dictated. She promised to take a rickshaw to the post office early tomorrow morning. She promised to send the letter by express delivery.

Now she sits at the table that has been with her for decades, running her fingers over a gouge that Bela had hacked into the wood after they'd had a fight. What can she write in her rusty English to change Tara's mind? She cannot even imagine her granddaughter's life, the whirlwind foreign world she lives in. All Sabitri has is a handful of photos. The child Tara in a costume, brandishing a broomstick, celebrating some odd American festival, the point of which Sabitri could not figure out. A teenage Tara at a special party called a prom, alien and glamorous in a strapless dress. Sabitri had been intimidated by her glittery cheekbones, the sophistication of her plucked eyebrows. How different from the photo she kept in her drawer, under her sari-blouses: baby Tara in Bela's arms, peering from under a woolly blue hood, a foggy orange bridge floating in the distance.

That had been the first photo. Sabitri still remembers the pang she felt on receiving it because she had so wanted to be present at Tara's birth. But she hadn't been invited.

Push away the past, that vessel in which all emotions curdle to regret. Start the letter.

Dearest Granddaughter Tara,

I am sure you are surprised to receive this, since customarily we write to each other only to send Bijoya greetings. Your mother informs me that you do not wish to continue with college. I am very sorry to hear this and hope you will reconsider. Without education, a woman has little chance of standing on her own feet. She will be forced to watch from the sidelines while others enjoy the life she has dreamed about—

Wrong, wrong, all wrong. An entire hour wasted. She balls up the sheet and throws it to the floor.

Dearest Granddaughter Tara,

You do not know how lucky you are to be sent to college. So many families are too poor to be able to afford such an expense. It would be a criminal waste if you do not avail yourself of the opportunity life has given you.

She hates what she has written, prissy, stilted, schoolmarmish. Tears it up. Her mind wanders, again, to the photos. Her favorite one, which she keeps on her dresser, is of Tara at the swimming pool, taken when she was nine. Dressed in a pink two-piece swimsuit, she balances on the edge of a board, about to leap into the water. Her face is filled with terror and elation.

How well Sabitri knows that feeling.