Before We Visit the Goddess (13 page)

Our first stop is a department store because Mrs. Mehta insists on swimming in the ocean. Tales of the jellyfish that infest the Gulf have failed to shake her resolve. She hovers dangerously over the bikinis but finally, to my relief, picks a decorous emerald-green skirted swimsuit. She assures me she is a good swimmer; all the cousins learned in the pond behind the family house. But her eyes skitter away, and I make another mental note: keep Mrs. M within grabbing distance. This means I, too, must get in the water.

“We'll have to stop at my apartment to pick up my suit,” I say.

“Cool. I want to see where you live.”

I warn her that it's nothing like the Mehta home.

“I should hope not. Will that nice man of yours be around?”

“Robert's staying over at Victor's. He probably won't get back until evening.” But I wish hard for him to have returned home. I want Mrs. M to meet him.

On the way we pick up a feast: French bread, Brie, fruit, a chocolate tart, two bottles of Chardonnay. Mrs. Mehta insists on paying.

“I have plenty of money,” she says. “From my son. He tries to be a good boy, to make me happy.” I think I hear her sigh.

The music hits me as soon as I open our apartment door. Led Zeppelin. Robert's back! I'm about to call his name when I notice the high heels. The frilly blue blouse, abandoned in a heap halfway to the bedroom door. I glance at Mrs. Mehta, but she's examining her palm as though a crucial secret is etched there. On our beat-up sofa, slumped over as though someone tossed it there in a hurry, the raccoon regards me mournfully through its sideways eyes.

We lie on the deserted beach in the dark. We reached Galveston late—it took a while for my hands to stop shaking after I got back to the car. I'd been afraid Robert might come looking for me—or had I been hoping? Either way, he did not appear.

I am sorry that Mrs. Mehta didn't get to swim or have her picnic. We left the hamper in the trunk. Neither of us was in an eating mood. We did bring the bottles of wine, which now lie toppled between us, mostly empty, next to the raccoon.

Yes. It was the one thing I snatched up before I fled. A shock had gone through me when I grabbed it by the leg, like it was charged with electricity. A furious thrill. My nerves still ring from it.

Mrs. Mehta and I are telling each other stories about the stars. “There's Kalpurush,” she says. “See his sword. See his crown. He guards the gate to heaven. In exchange for his power, he had to take the vow of celibacy.”

“That's Hercules,” I say, though perhaps I'm pointing at Ursa Major. I tell Mrs. Mehta of his death at the hands of his wife, who suspected him of loving another woman.

“Should I have confronted him?” I ask. “Should I have been that kind of person?”

“I can't stay with them,” she says. “They fight because of me. The other day, I heard them mention divorce.” She adds, “Maybe it wasn't your Robert in the bedroom. Maybe he loaned the apartment to friends for the day.”

I understand. She's offering me a way out. The stars hang over my head, a blurry, jeweled net. My cell phone rings, and rings again. I reach for the last of the wine and encounter the raccoon. Robert was right. Its fur is soft and bristly at the same time. The tide is coming in; waves break at my feet. The shock I'd felt, standing in the doorway, was a terrible thing. But what was worse was that in a moment it was gone, as though all along a part of me had known that this was where I was headed. That I, too, hadn't been worth a man's faithful loving.

“My dad cheated on my mother,” I say. “Still, the day he was leaving, she fell at his feet and begged him not to go.”

“Don't be too hard on her.”

“She asked me to beg him, too. But I wouldn't. Later she said, If only you'd done what I told you, he might have stayed.”

Mrs. Mehta sighs. “People get addicted to love. Or just to having someone around. So many times Mr. Mehta gave me grief. I had to get his permission for every little thing: read a book, go to the cinema, even phone my parents. A lot of times he'd say no just because he could. Yet when he died, I wept and wept. I didn't know what to do with myself.”

“Will you come with me tomorrow to pick up my things?” I ask.

“Yes. But where will you go?”

“Don't know. Maybe Blanca will let me crash at her place for a while.”

“You could come with me,” she says, “when I return to India. I still have a flat there.”

India! The word surges inside me like a wave.

I hug the raccoon. In the salt breeze, it smells damp and raw, the way it was meant to. Soon it'll be bobbing on the ocean with its small, fierce smile. The phone has fallen silent. Ebb and flow, ebb and flow, our lives. Is that why we're fascinated by the steadfastness of stars?

The water reaches my calves. I begin the story of the Pleiades, women transformed into birds so swift and bright that no man could snare them.

T
he phone call about Sabitri came very early in the morning, but that was not a problem because Bipin Bihari Ghatak was up already. In fact, he had been up for some time. In recent years, after he had turned fifty-five, sleep had become a fickle mistress. And he was not the kind of man to lie in bed wishing for its return once it had abandoned him. He had finished brushing his teeth with a neem stick, chewing on its fibrous end, relishing the cleanly bitter taste it left in his mouth. Not many people used the sticks nowadays. He had to go all the way to Taltola Bazaar to get his week's supply, but he didn't mind. Ever since he had quit his job as manager of Durga Sweets, he didn't have much to do.

Bipin Bihari had finished his bath, too, shivering a little because, being by necessity frugal and by nature spartan, he preferred not to heat his bathwater. Besides, the ancient heater in his one-room flat was moody. When it refused to cooperate, he had to heat water in the rice pot and ferry it from stove top to bathroom. He didn't want to become dependent on such a troublesome habit.

On the small table where he both ate and worked, he had moved aside a stack of forms (intermittently, he took on auditing jobs) and set out his cup and saucer. He had measured from a monogrammed wood box a spoonful of the premium Darjeeling tea that was his one indulgence, and poured boiling water over it. But this morning the tea would go to waste, because on the other end of the line was Sabitri's maid Rekha, calling from the village, and crying so hard that twice he had to ask her to calm down and repeat herself.

Once he grasped what had occurred, Bipin Bihari only took the time to pull a worn kurta over his undershirt and to grab, from its hiding place under his mattress, the plastic bag in which he kept his emergency money. He thrust it into his satchel, hurried down the narrow, ill-lit stairs to the street, and hailed (for the first time in years) a taxi, though he knew it was going to be dreadfully expensive because Howrah Station was at the other end of Kolkata. He leaned forward and grasped the resin seat-back and asked the driver to kindly hurry, it was a matter of life and death. The man raised an eyebrow at that, but Bipin Bihari, who was not prone to exaggeration, was merely telling the truth.

At Howrah, he bought a ticket to Porabazar, the nearest station to Sabitri's village, ran to the platform, and managed to wrestle his way onto the crowded train as it was pulling out. He must have looked quite ill, because a young man got up from his seat, which young people never did nowadays, and said, “Here, Dadu, you had better sit down.” At any other time, being addressed as a grandfather would have stung, for Bipin Bihari took pride in keeping himself fit, walking for an hour each evening around the park near his flat. But today he lowered himself with heavy thankfulness onto the wood bench and wiped the sweat from his face with the edge of his dhoti because in his rush he had forgotten his handkerchief. His heart was beating too fast, an erratic, dismayed drumroll. How could this have happened? Only last week he had phoned Sabitri to check up on her, and she had laughed and called him a worrywart and said she was doing fine.

On the train, a vendor was selling tea and biscuits. Bipin Bihari bought a cup, along with two small packets of Parle biscuits. He made himself drink the tea, even though it tasted appalling (
what
had the man used to sweeten the brew?), and eat the biscuits, which were stale and crumbly. If his blood sugar dropped, he would be of no use to Sabitri. He focused on the rhythm of the train, which was at once jerky and soothing, to keep from imagining what he might find when he reached the other end. It was a long journey; in between, he dozed and thought he was back at Durga Sweets, sitting at his desk in that windowless back room lit by a bulb hanging from its wire, sweating because it was always too hot there. Sabitri leaned over his desk, looking at the slogan he had just come up with:
We Make the World a Sweeter Place
. Her hair, its silky hibiscus smell, fell tangled onto his neck. “It's perfect!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands. That was when he knew it was a dream. Sabitri would never have come to work without her hair tied back in a bun; she would never have clapped with such teenagerish abandon.

Awake, he felt bereft. Then something Rekha had mentioned on the phone swam back into his mind.
Ma said that if anything happened to her, I was to call you first, no one else.

But of course, Bipin Bihari thought as he waited for station after station to pass, for the sooty factories of suburban towns to give way to young paddy fields so brilliantly green they hurt the eye. For as long back as he could remember, wasn't he the one Sabitri had turned to, in good times and bad? In the midst of his anxiety, the thought made him smile.

Walking into the small house that Sabitri had built after retirement on the plot where her parents' mud hut had once stood, Bipin Bihari knew he was too late. Not because the front doors were carelessly ajar on their hinges. (He closed them behind him; Sabitri would not have wanted flies in her home.) Not because there was a gaggle of servant women, Rekha in their center, gathered in the inner courtyard, rocking back and forth, keening. (He instructed them to control themselves; Sabitri detested histrionics.) Not even because of the body (it was not Sabitri; it would never be her), laid out on a mattress on the floor, covered with a white sheet. He knew it because his heart had not stuttered and stumbled the way it always did when he was about to see her. His heart, now reduced to a mere muscle, resigned for the rest of Bipin Bihari's life to the task of stolid pumping.

Fortunately, there was no time to dwell on such things. He sent for the doctor, ascertained the cause of death (failure of the heart), and set in motion the process for getting a death certificate. He phoned the village cremation grounds and asked them to make the necessary arrangements. He told Rekha to inform Sabitri's friends of the funeral (but Sabitri had kept mostly to herself, so there were not many). Searching guiltily through drawers, he managed to locate Sabitri's address book and phoned her daughter in America. He made several calls, each time leaving a detailed message, trying not to think of the bill, and who would take care of it. But Bela did not pick up. In this heat, the body could not be kept in the house any longer. Already the room was filling with a sickly sweet stench. Finally, Bipin Bihari had to tell the cremation society folks to load the body into the back of their lorry and take it away.