Before We Visit the Goddess (16 page)

When Bipin Bihari hurried to the stove, Sabitri was holding a plate with a sweet on it.

“Isn't it beautiful?” she asked.

It was, indeed, an elegant-looking dessert, the palest orange-red against the white china, and shaped like a tiny mango. “Yes,” he said, but he was distracted by her flushed, glistening face, the damp curls clinging to her forehead. It took him back to the day they met—had it been only five years?

“I tried something different,” Sabitri said. “Tell me what you think. Be honest, now!” She broke off part of the sweet and put it in his mouth, then ate the rest herself.

That swift touch of her finger against his tongue. The smell of her sweat, like no one else's. He couldn't speak. The sweet melted in his mouth, the flavors perfectly proportioned.

“Well?” She looked at him anxiously.

“You've got it,” he said.

“I think so, too!” she cried, clasping her hands. “It must be the saffron I put in. Oh, Bipin, I'm so happy, I don't think I've ever been happier.”

“Me, too,” he said. But that was not completely true.

She wore a white widow-sari, unrelieved even by the thinnest border. She had pulled her hair back in a tight bun for this interview, attempting to look professional and severe, but a host of unruly tendrils had escaped. They danced about in the breeze from the fan. By the pulse beating in her neck, he saw that she was new at this and trying very hard not to do it wrong. The knowledge formed a small wound inside him.

Sabitri (though he did not think of her in that way yet) pushed his application back at him, across the stained table of the teahouse where they had met for the interview. “You're overqualified. Surely you know that. Someone like you, with an accounting degree from Scottish Church College—you're bound to get an offer from a big firm.”

Guilt pricked him. Only this morning he had received a letter from Philips International, where he had interviewed last week. They were ready to hire him as assistant manager of purchases, Kolkata head office. The salary had made him blink in delighted disbelief. He was planning to call them tomorrow morning and accept.

“Why did you even apply for this job—business manager for a small sweet shop that hasn't even opened yet?”

Among his friends, Bipin Bihari was known as quick-witted. But in front of this woman he grew tongue-tied, though he couldn't have said why. She was not pretty like he had expected her to be; her chin was too sharp, and there was a slight gap between her front teeth.

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Did you come to gawk at me? The young widow who fought an oil company and won? That's it, isn't it? You men, you're all the same.”

It was not untrue. News of her case had rippled through the city, and her name had been in the paper a few weeks ago, along with a photo where she held tightly to the shoulders of a thin, unsmiling girl. The photographer had caught her at a flattering angle. A group of his friends, laughing in the manner of young men, remarked on her curvaceous waist, her intense, passionate eyes. A few lewd jokes were made. He was not one of the jokers, but he'd been intrigued. When, searching for a job, he saw her advertisement in the paper, he recognized her name and circled it. Now here he was.

She flung some rupees on the table for the tea they'd drunk and stood up, incandescent with outrage. She was at the door of the tea shop before he could react. He had to run to catch up.

“Please,” he said, desperate to stop her. “I want the job.” The words startled him because he had not intended to say them.

“Why?” She stared at him distrustfully.

He didn't have an answer—he who was usually so pragmatic. A part of him was already berating himself.
Impulsive stupid idiot
. To appease it, he thought,
Just for a month. I'll quit after a month.
A group of his friends were going for a holiday in the mountains to celebrate their graduation. That's what this would be. His adventure. Afterward, he would pick up his real life again.

This was what he believed, ignorant of the perilous mutation that had already begun inside him.

She gave a small, bitter laugh. “You probably think I'm going to pay a lot. But I won't. I can't. The lawyers took most of the money.”

“That's fine,” he said. Craftily, so that she wouldn't guess his plan, he added, “I'll expect a raise, though, if I make the business grow.”

“It's a deal,” she said, holding out her hand. He put his own in it and was startled by her firm, urbane grip.

“Although you probably won't stay with me long enough for that,” she added.

He smiled, continuing his charade. “You might be surprised.” But the handshake distracted him. Where did a Bengali woman dressed in widow-white learn to shake hands like that? It was a mystery worth deciphering.

They walked together to the bus stop. She had dropped her stiff manner and was telling him her hopes about the store. She was going to name it after her mother, who had died two years ago.

“She was the most talented sweet-maker I've known, and the hardest worker. She never had a day's rest in her life. Never received the appreciation she deserved.”

With a pang he thought of his own mother. She had scrimped for years so that he could have a decent education. “Baba,” she told him sometimes, “you are my jewel.”

“Just wait, Ma,” he would reply. “Once I get a job, I'll take care of everything you need.”

“She died when I was in Assam,” Sabitri was saying. “I couldn't even be at her deathbed, I was so tangled in my own troubles then. But through Durga Sweets I'll make her into a household name in Kolkata. You'll help me, won't you? Oh, here comes number seventy-five. That's my bus.”

The bus approached them, wobbly and belching exhaust, bloated with passengers. Bipin Bihari hailed it. He positioned himself behind Sabitri, blocking off the others who were trying to board, ignoring their angry comments so she could climb on without being shoved around.

He had not noticed that the sky had grown black. It began to rain, fat drops darkening his blue shirt.

“Take my umbrella,” Sabitri shouted from the bus window, and though he said no, she lobbed it at him. “I'll see you tomorrow!”

He unfurled it, gripping the curved handle which she must have touched a hundred times. It was a lady's umbrella, too small for him. The rain fell earnestly. His new leather interview shoes, which had cost more than he could afford, grew waterlogged. He tried to feel concern but was unsuccessful.
Tomorrow.
What an amazing word. He could smell, on the rain, the odor of kadam flowers, a little like molasses, a little (in his imagination) like the recesses of a woman's body. He maneuvered past puddles toward the little flat he shared with his parents and two sisters, whistling a tune from a recent movie. “Gaata Rahe Mera Dil, Tu Hi Meri Manzil.” You, My Destination. Magnanimously, he imagined befriending the stiff little girl in the photo, taking her, perhaps, to the zoo. Sabitri would like that.

He had no idea of the troubles waiting for him on the other side of tomorrow, the acrid clashes with his parents, who were bewildered by his refusal to accept the better job offer, who grew convinced that the widow had cast a black magic spell on him. At the end of a particularly vicious argument, he moved to a hostel. They would not take his phone calls after that. His letters, with checks folded inside, were returned unopened. But how could he abandon Sabitri? Oh, the jagged tear when love pulls you in opposite directions. He would not be invited to his sisters' modest weddings. He would find out about his mother's death from a distant relative.

But for now he whistled jauntily through the downpour. Soaked through, his pants flapped muddily around his shins. His heart arced up in the dark chamber of his chest like some wild sea creature. This, this was happiness: the lightning carving its signature into the belly of a cloud; the little birds in the kadam tree, scattering yellow pollen as they fluffed their feathers; the tender curve of Sabitri's arm as she tossed him the umbrella. When he reached home, he decided, he would ask his mother to fry him a plate of crisp onion pakoras.

W
hen Bela arrived in the United States at the age of nineteen, carrying papers that falsely claimed she was a tourist, Sanjay was the only person she knew in the whole country. He wasn't her husband yet; the plan was for them to marry as soon as she got here. She was crazy about him—how else to account for this desperate thing she had done? But perhaps she didn't trust him all the way, because when the airplane landed in San Francisco, her palms were slick with sweat. Where would she turn if he wasn't out in the lobby waiting for her? But there he stood, on the other side of the frosted double doors, thinner than she remembered, his scruffy student beard replaced by a trim, responsible-looking mustache—grown, he later told her, so that Americans would take him seriously. He looked as worried as she felt. It struck her that he, too, had had his doubts. Would she really give up, for his sake, everything she was familiar with? Drop out of college? Cut herself off from her mother—a wound never to be totally healed, because that's the kind of woman her mother was?

Bela had thought she knew what love felt like, but when she saw Sanjay at the airport after six long months, her heart gave a great, hurtful lurch, as though it were trying to leap out of her body to meet him.
This
, she thought.
This is it
. But it was only part of the truth. She would learn over the next years that love can feel a lot of different ways, and sometimes it can hurt a lot more. But on that day the lurching made her forget the cart with her suitcase on it and run through the crowd to Sanjay. She threw her arms around him the way she never could have done in Kolkata and kissed him on the mouth. No one catcalled. No one harassed them or took umbrage or even noticed, except for an old man who offered them a pensive smile.

When she had enough breath to speak again, Bela said to Sanjay, “I think I'm going to be happy in America.”

And he, smiling, said, “I know you will.”

But Bela had been wrong. Someone else had noticed them kissing, and once she surfaced, she noticed him, too. He was taller than Sanjay and more muscular; his mustache, though similar to Sanjay's (so similar that later she would wonder if Sanjay had copied him), was aggressively luxurious. Next to him, Sanjay appeared young and inexperienced, not much more than a boy. Bela had never thought of Sanjay in that way. In Kolkata, he'd been the student leader of an important political party, someone people respected and even feared. His new American avatar made her uncomfortable.

The man had been watching their reunion with a mildly sardonic expression. Now he said, “Shonu, go get the cart before someone steals that suitcase.”

Sanjay's smile grew embarrassed and he nodded sheepishly. “Yes, Bishu-da.”

And suddenly Bela knew who he was: Bishwanath Bhaduri, Sanjay's childhood friend in Kolkata, his next-door neighbor and mentor; his—and thus, her—savior. Her face burned because the first thing he had seen her do was behave in such a wild way.

Bishu loaded the bag into the trunk of his car.

“This is really light,” he said. Bela flushed, not sure if the comment was compliment or reproof. She'd had to pack in a rush; it had been hard to find a time when both her mother and Rekha the maid were out of the house. She had thrown in a few salwar kameezes and saris, a couple of sweaters, and her dance costume, though she would probably never get a chance to wear it. At the last moment, with the taxi already honking for her downstairs, she'd snatched up—guiltily, because it wasn't really hers—the family photo album from the almirah in the living room. Now she wished she had thought to pick up gifts—a couple of packets, at the very least, of the hot dalmoot mix that Sanjay loved.

Bela climbed into the back. The men had offered her the front passenger seat, but she was still mortified. She wrapped the end of her sari around her shoulders. She hadn't thought it would be this cold in California. At the airport, she had been too flustered to take note of her surroundings; now she longed to see what America looked like. But they were speeding along a dark freeway and there wasn't much to observe except arched light-posts that loomed up suddenly, looking like they belonged on the set of a science fiction movie, and disappeared just as fast. The men spoke about work, Bishu telling Sanjay that he tended to trust people too easily. Bela tried hard to stay awake, but jet lag had her in its leaden grasp. The conversation up front had turned to Bengal politics, something about police encounters. The men's tones grew truculent. She tried to shut them out and thought she heard, far away, her mother calling.

By now Sabitri would have received the goodbye note Bela had entrusted to Bishu's friend in Kolkata, the one who helped her get her passport and ticket. Sabitri would be very angry. Bela had been afraid of what she might do—to herself as much as to Bishu's friend. She had instructed the friend to deliver the note to Durga Sweets so that her mother would be forced to control herself in front of her employees. Give it to Bipin Babu, the manager, Bela had said, and then leave right away. Bipin Bihari, who had been at Durga Sweets ever since it opened, was her mother's confidant, the closest thing she had to a friend. In her youth, Bela had been jealous of how much more time Sabitri spent with Bipin Babu than with her, and had curtly refused his tentative overtures of friendship—an outing to Magnolia's for ice cream, a visit to the circus. But now she was thankful for his presence. A stable sort, he would know how to defuse the situation.