Before We Visit the Goddess (4 page)

Granddaughter, when you are poor and ill-educated, how unequipped you are to read the world. All you know is your place in it: down near the bottom. You believe you are meant for better things, but how will you ever climb out to get them? The first opportunity that appears, you grasp at it to pull yourself up. You don't check to see if it can bear your weight.

She wore her red sari to college and was roundly teased by her friends, especially when, in Maths class, the young professor dropped his books while setting them on the table.
You're distracting him, Sabi!
She laughed it off, but as he was leaving, in a spirit of mischief she looked him in the eye, with what she considered a sultry smile. He dropped his books again. Later her friends said they thought they would die from holding in their laughter.

It was as though she had entered a golden time. She woke early and heavy-eyed and rushed to the kitchen to prepare desserts: mihidana and malpua, pithay made from sweet potatoes, fried and dipped in thick syrup. Leelamoyi's friends loved them all. Even the young master—who had never had a sweet tooth, Leelamoyi told Sabitri—asked for two helpings of rice pudding. He told his mother that whoever had prepared it was a treasure. Make sure you don't let her go, he said.

Sabitri wrote all this in a letter to Durga, along with elaborate descriptions of the sweets, which she had adapted to Leelamoyi's citified taste. She did not mention her missed classes, how she was falling behind in her schoolwork. On the envelope, she wrote a line asking her father to please read the letter to her mother. Perhaps the letter was lost, because she never received a reply.

Late at night, after the terrace (they had decided it was best to meet post-dinner, when everyone assumed they had gone to bed), she tossed and turned on her pallet, longing to tell her mother about Rajiv. Her secret cramped her belly like indigestion. If there had been a chance to see Durga face-to-face, she would have done it. Durga would have been shocked. Maybe she would have slapped her. But because she loved her daughter, she would have finally come around.

On the terrace, Rajiv told her how in the operating theater he felt he was drowning in the blood, horrifyingly bright, that sometimes pulsed out over his hands. She shuddered and held him close, her lips in his hair.

“Thank God I have you to talk to,” he said against her collarbone. “Otherwise I would kill myself.”

This, then, was why he loved her. She was his confessional, his absolution.

Yes
, she thought. She had never felt so necessary.

He took her face in his hands and looked into it as though it were the moon. When he buried his own face in her breasts, desire, dangerous as a sparking wire, traveled down her body into the pit of herself until she thought she would break apart.

“I wish this moment would last forever, Tri. That it would become my whole life.”

Yes, yes
.

She loved the way he shortened her name, made it unique. But a moment cannot become a whole life. She knew that. She was hungry for more.

One of Leelamoyi's card-playing friends had become a grandmother. She would be gone to her daughter's home for a whole month. But how would they play Twenty-Nine without her? Sabitri was summoned to Leelamoyi's airy bedroom, told the rules of the game. She found them simple enough.

“Smart girl!” Leelamoyi said, smiling with her brilliant, betel-stained lips. “Can you come home right after your classes, then?”

It wasn't really a question.

Sabitri no longer had time to study in the library. She rushed home and changed into one of her good saris—she had four now, given to her for this purpose—and went to the upstairs room, where, because she was better at strategy than the other women, Leelamoyi insisted that she be her partner. In order to play, Sabitri had to sit across from Leelamoyi, on her bed. At first she was uncomfortable. The people in her village, her parents included, would have flinched at such presumption. But Leelamoyi didn't seem to mind. All she cared about was winning. Paro brought tea and crisp kachuris stuffed with spicy green peas. “Eat, eat,” Leelamoyi said. She addressed Sabitri as
meye
, a word that could mean either “girl” or “daughter.” Sabitri could see the rage behind the crust of politeness that was Paro's face.

But, Granddaughter, I found it impossible to worry. How soft the mattress was, how fine and silken the bedcover. How sweet the sandesh I had made that morning. And Leelamoyi calling me “daughter”—surely that was a sign.

At school she told her friends she had to help in the house. It was only a half lie, wasn't it? She felt guilty at the disappointment on their faces, for they counted on her to explain their English texts: Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Hardy. But as soon as she stepped out of the college gates, she forgot everything: her friends, her upcoming exams, the eyes of the young Maths professor searching her out during class. It was like being bewitched.

This was what Sabitri dreamed as she rode on the tram, dozing because she didn't get enough sleep nowadays: She's in a wedding mandap, dressed in bridal red. She lifts a garland high and slips it over Rajiv's head. Under the bright Petromax lanterns, she sees her face reflected, tiny and shining and perfect, in his eyes. The auspicious sound of conches accompany them to the third floor of the Mittir home, where Rajiv has told her his room is. In the bed the years pass with swift pleasure. A baby joins them. Two. She pushes back the gold bangles on her arms to nurse them. At her waist, the cool heft of the household keys that Leelamoyi has handed over. In the kitchen the cook nods docile agreement,
Yes, Boudimoni
, when she tells him to make jackfruit curry. Paro washes the children's soiled nappies. No. She deletes Paro from her world.

Perfect, a perfect dream, granddaughter. Why, then, waking with a start as the conductor jangled the bell for my stop, did I feel a constriction in my chest, a sense that I had misplaced something?

Summer had descended upon Kolkata with epic vengeance. Sabitri came back from college bedraggled with sweat, craving a bath, cold water cascading over her body in the maids' bathroom. But a servant was waiting. Leelamoyi wanted to see her. Sabitri was surprised. There were no card games today—or had she made a mistake? Let me drink some water, she said. Change my sari. The woman scrunched up her face and shook her head. Rani Ma's waiting. Better come right now.

The first thing she saw when she entered the room was the red quilt from the terrace, crumpled on the floor like the pelt of a dead animal. The blood rushed to her head and then away; she had to hold on to the doorframe. When her vision cleared she looked around for Rajiv, who would defend her. But there was only Leelamoyi, and behind her Paro, hands on her hips, swollen with satisfaction.

From across the years, Sabitri remembers Leelamoyi's contorted mouth, spitting out invectives:
conniving slut
,
harlot's daughter
,
poisonous snake in my bosom.
Her own mouth frozen, so that when she tried to say she had done nothing wrong, the words would not obey. She learned that Rajiv had been sent away already to his uncle's home in another city. He would continue his studies there.
So don't be thinking that you can sink your witch-claws into him again.
As for Sabitri, she was to leave the house right now. No, Leelamoyi didn't care where she went, or what happened to her.
If it wasn't for the fact that your father's a priest, I would have you whipped. Now get out of my sight before I change my mind.

Sabitri stood at the tram stop for a long while in the oppressive dusk, carrying her small painted trunk. Finally, she boarded a tram that would take her to the men's college. She could think of no other place. She opened her handbag—so light—and looked down at the frighteningly few rupee notes in there. Her trunk was light, too. Paro had followed her to her room and rummaged through it—
Let's see what you're stealing
—and taken the silk saris. She'd taken some of Sabitri's own things as well. A buffalo-horn comb that Durga had given her. A tiny bottle of rosewater Sabitri had saved up for months to buy. Sabitri had been too heartsick to protest.

The men's college loomed eerily in the gloom. She slipped through the gate, thankful that the gateman wasn't there to stop her, and ran up the stairs. On the second story, at the end of a corridor, there was a small room with a plaque on it,
WOMEN'S COMMON ROOM
. She had gone there once, exploring, with her friends. It was piled with dusty furniture and smelled of mice droppings. But there was a bolt on the inside, and a small toilet. She could stay there for the night. Tomorrow—ah, she couldn't handle the thought of tomorrow yet.

When she reached it, the door to the common room was padlocked.

The strength went out of her and she slid to the floor, unable to hold in her sobs any longer. Terror and rage. But foremost was the fear of what might happen to her tonight when the night watchman came by. Would he throw her out on the street? Would he do worse? Beneath it all roiled the humiliation. What would her parents, her relatives, her village, say if they knew that she had been kicked out of the Mittir home like a dog? No one would care that the love she and Rajiv had felt for each other was pure and beautiful.
Good daughters are fortunate lamps, brightening the family's name.
Could she have strayed any farther from that?

The second half of the saying, the part her mother had left unspoken, struck her like a slap:

Good daughters are fortunate lamps, brightening the family's name.

Wicked daughters are firebrands, blackening the family's fame.

She had been weeping too hard to hear the footsteps. When she felt a hand on her shoulder, she flinched and cried out, throwing up her arms to protect herself. But it wasn't the night watchman, as she had feared. It was her Maths professor.

He'd been working on his research, he said, in one of the classrooms—something he often did, since the hostel where he stayed was very noisy. On his way out, he heard a woman weeping and came to see what the matter was. He was shocked to see her in such a state. What had happened?