Don't Let Him Know (5 page)

The week after the wedding was a blur of dinners and relatives. Romola spent most of her time at her mother’s, getting ready to leave for America while Avinash stayed at his. Romola was amazed at how easily she left India behind. Her mother and aunt wept copiously at the airport while her uncle kept offering everyone cups of tea. But Romola was calm as if she was an actor in someone else’s script.

As the airplane left the airport she looked out of the window at the lights of Calcutta growing smaller and smaller. She had a sense of her past, her ties, her home all falling away behind her like an unravelling sari. Perhaps, she thought, sipping her Coca-Cola, I was not meant to be Indian at all. She glanced over at Avinash, seated next to her, absorbed in the latest issue of
Time
. This was really the first time she had been alone with him since the wedding night – if one could be alone in an airplane filled with strangers. Sometimes she hardly felt married at all. He glanced up at her and, finding himself caught in her gaze, looked away guiltily. Then he said quietly, ‘How do you imagine America?’

‘America – I don’t know,’ she said hesitantly. ‘Big buildings, fast cars, movies.’

‘Washing machines,’ she added as an afterthought. ‘Lawnmowers, ovens.’ Then she thought for a while and said with a smile, ‘My aunt had a magazine about how to entertain in America. They had a recipe for a turkey. I always wondered what it might taste like. Have you ever eaten a turkey?’

‘Yes, it’s not that exciting,’ he replied. Then he added, ‘You never thought of America as freedom?’

‘Freedom?’ she was perplexed. ‘No, not really.’ Then she smiled slightly and said, ‘Maybe it was for you when you went there as a student. But I am going there as your wife.’

‘That’s true,’ he replied.

‘Are you afraid that now that I am going with you, you will lose your freedom?’ she asked half-teasingly.

‘Who is really free anyway?’ he answered without looking at her and returned to the magazine. She opened her mouth to speak but he seemed to have drawn curtains around himself.

Romola hated America from the moment she stepped off that plane. At the immigration counter, she couldn’t understand a thing the man in the uniform said. She knew it was English but the words seemed foreign, tangled together like a ball of wool. The accents were jarring – they had none of the clean crispness of the BBC World Service programmes she so loved and listened to on her father’s prized short-wave radio. She stared at the man, baffled, and then looked to Avinash for help.

‘It’s okay,’ said Avinash to the man. ‘This is my wife’s first time in the US. She is still getting used to things. We just got married.’ He was suddenly in charge, thought Romola. The nervous lost boy in the wedding dhoti was gone, sloughed off in Calcutta.

‘Congratulations,’ said the immigration man, his teeth white against his bristly black moustache. ‘Welcome to America.’

Romola thought she should say something. But instead she just nodded and quickly looked away.

Avinash’s house was nothing like the quaint cottages with their filigree of honeysuckle she remembered from the biscuit tins. He lived in a non-descript one-bedroom apartment in a squat blue-grey concrete block of identical buildings each with a stubbly patch of green lawn in front. For some reason it was called Nile Apartments though Romola could detect nothing Egyptian about it. There was a child’s bicycle lying on the lawn in front of his apartment and old newspapers near the front door, the newsprint discoloured into a brittle yellow. As they walked up the stairs she could hear the television in the apartment below going at full blast. She could smell something cooking, something fried. For a moment she felt a twinge of hunger and wondered what they would eat for dinner. Would he expect her to cook? Did he have things like rice and cumin and coriander in his kitchen?

When Avinash turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open her heart sank. The apartment smelled of trapped air and stale food. ‘I should have left a window open,’ he said apologetically. Romola said nothing. On a dining table she could see an old overripe banana in a fruit basket, its yellow skin blotched with black leopard spots. She could almost taste that banana from the door – its rich and cloying smell pooling around her stickily. She suddenly lost her appetite. ‘Let’s get some pizza,’ said Avinash. ‘Would you like that?’ She just nodded.

That night, as they lay in bed jet-lagged and trying to sleep, Avinash turned to her and tentatively stroked her arm. When he raised his face to kiss her, Romola could smell the bath soap on him. Lime, she thought. He smelled cool. He kissed her on the lips, his eyes closed. Her heart thudded wildly. For a moment she longed to be back in her bedroom in Calcutta. She wanted the hum of traffic around her, the sudden blare of horns, the voices of people walking on the street at all hours of the day, snatches of conversation trailing through the air, the yapping dogs, the cheerfully noisy night. Here the night felt almost naked in its silence, filling the room with just the harsh sound of his breath and the drumbeat of her heart. She heard him curse softly as he fumbled with the drawstring of his pyjamas. She felt his hands pulling at the pale blue nightdress her aunt had bought her from New Market a week before the wedding.

Her friend Leela who had got married two years before had told her the first time would hurt. But she hadn’t realized it would be so short. Avinash climbed on top of her, still wearing his nightshirt, though she could feel the bare skin of his legs on her. His fingers digging into her arms, he tried to position himself between her legs. When he finally managed to get inside her she gasped at the sudden tearing pain, biting her tongue, tasting the salt of her blood, afraid that any sound would carry through the silent night, startling the neighbours. But almost before she could get used to the feeling of Avinash inside her, he was done. She realized that his eyes had been shut throughout. She wondered if she should have closed her eyes as well. He lay on her limply as if all the air had drained out of him and then patted her gently on the cheek. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘Are you okay?’ It was the first thing he had said in bed.

‘I am okay,’ she said. ‘But I need to clean up.’

In the bathroom she stood at the sink and gingerly lifted up her nightdress to touch herself between her legs. She didn’t want to look. She just wanted to stand under the shower and let everything wash away.

When she came back he was already asleep. She stood at the window staring out at the patches of grass outside. The child’s bicycle still lay on its side, like a capsized ship. Across the lawn one of the apartments still had the light on. She could see the blue-grey flicker of a television set. She wanted to throw open the window and lean out into the night and breathe deeply. What kind of flowers bloomed here at night? What did an American night smell of, she wondered. But she was afraid she’d wake Avinash. He slept curled up on one side of the bed, his arm sprawled across the pillow where she had been. She looked at his face splashed with the moonlight and thought to herself, ‘He is quite pleasant-looking, really. Tomorrow it will be better. Desire will come. Desire will grow.’

She wondered what time it was in India. Lunchtime, probably. She closed her eyes and imagined her mother serving lunch. She could almost smell the rice. She carefully clutched that smell to her, like an amulet, as she crept back into bed.

By the time she woke in the morning he was already up and she could hear the hiss of the shower. ‘Good morning,’ he said with a smile when he came out towelling his hair. ‘Welcome to America.’

But Romola never quite felt welcome. The freeways with their whizzing cars and many lanes terrified her. She could not imagine ever being able to drive on them. Yet Avinash had told her that if you did not know how to drive here you were a prisoner. She was confused by all the machines she needed to handle and all the buttons she had to press to do anything. The first time she took the laundry down to the basement of their building she just turned around and left, unable to decipher the hieroglyphics of all those settings on the washing machine. But most of all she missed having people to talk to.

Two days after they came to America, Avinash returned to school. Research was busy he told her. He had lots of catching up to do. ‘Don’t wait for me,’ he said when he left in the morning. Soon he spent long hours at school, sometimes coming home after she had gone to bed. She would lie in the dark hearing the purr of the microwave as he warmed his dinner. As a little girl she remembered her mother always waited for her father to come home before she ate. But Romola invariably got a headache if she let herself go hungry too long. She would leave his dinner on the table in front of the jar of mango pickles she had found in the international section of the grocery store. She would lie in bed and try and figure out what he was eating.

‘He must be finished with the dal, he is probably on the chicken now.’ She would hear him open the refrigerator as he took out some Coke. They needed to get more Coke and detergent and something else. She knitted her brows and tried to remember what. Soon she knew she would hear the tap running as he rinsed the dishes and then the clank as he loaded them into the old green dishwasher. That was when she closed her eyes and turned on her side, away from his half of the bed. She wanted him to reach out to her, to apologize, to kiss her, to make her turn around and face him. But he did not seem to mind that she had gone to bed. She would feel the bed sag as he climbed on to it. Then the sharp minty smell of toothpaste. In a little while she would hear his gentle easy breathing and she would lie awake angry, making grocery lists in her head.

Within one month she felt she had been in America for ever, the routine of their lives already engraved. All week he worked late. On Saturdays they would go grocery shopping. Sometimes they would go to a film at the theatre near the university. Afterwards they would stop at an Italian place near campus. He would drink one beer. She would have a Coke with her pasta. Sometimes upon his encouragement she’d try a glass of wine even though she did not much like the taste. When they came home they would have sex. Now she shut her eyes as well. Once, the face of the actor she had once gone out with slipped into her head as Avinash panted over her. It was so vivid she opened her eyes with a start almost convinced Avinash could see it too, that it hung between them like a picture projected on her face. But Avinash’s eyes were still closed.

She thought once of writing to her mother, asking her whether she needed to do something. Who was supposed to tell her these things? But instead she wrote long letters about the weather, about meals she was cooking, about how the international store didn’t stock any panchphoran spices though it had most of everything else she needed.

Soon Romola too had her own rituals. After Avinash left for school she washed the cereal bowls. She examined the refrigerator and made a grocery list. She made lunch for herself always making a little extra in case Avinash stopped by unexpectedly to eat.

Around two o’clock every day she ran down to check the mail. She had even come to know the postman. He always said, ‘Hi, how’s it going?’ But usually all she got were catalogues from department stores and letters addressed to Current Resident. She would spend the afternoon reading about furniture sales and instalment plans to buy home entertainment systems. Apart from that all they seemed to get were bills and coupons from pizza joints.

She had written two letters home but had not got anything back. Letters from India could take three weeks, sometimes longer, Avinash told her, if they didn’t get lost.

It was over a month after they had arrived when she got her first letter from India. It had been raining all day – a fine dispiriting drizzle. It was a Saturday but Avinash had needed to go to school to grade papers. She had wanted to walk down to the library but was stuck indoors, since Avinash had taken their umbrella to his office. Frustrated, she had spent the whole day rearranging her spices. She had poured them into individual little spice jars and then labelled the jars in her best handwriting. For a while she debated whether to write the Bengali names or the English ones –
holud, jeerey
and
dhoney
or turmeric, cumin, coriander? She finally decided on ‘Turmeric’ ‘Cumin’ ‘Coriander’. But she did not know the word for
methi
so she left it blank. She smelled her hands – and suddenly remembered her mother cooking and then wiping her hands on her sari. Her old saris always had turmeric stains.

Seeing the little postal truck pull out of the driveway Romola wiped her hands on a paper towel and ran downstairs to get the mail. And there it was, a neat rectangular envelope with a whole line of crookedly stuck postage stamps on it – her first bona fide letter from India. The familiar bald head of Gandhi and the smudged postmark made her heart twist. She didn’t wait to recognize the handwriting and there was no return address on the envelope. She raced up to the apartment two steps at a time, smiling, tossed the rest of the mail on the dining table, pulled out the Kashmiri letter-cutter her friend Leena had given her and slit open the envelope. There were two sheets in there – ruled sheets torn from a writing pad.

Dear Avinash,

Oh, she thought, it’s for him. Maybe it’s his mother. But she kept reading, greedy for news from home.

Your wedding invitation came in the mail the other day. Not even a handwritten note with it. I guess I should say congratulations and send you felicitations for a long and happy married life as they do in those wedding telegrams. But pardon me if I am unable to do that. I wonder though why you never bothered to call or let me know. After all, after everything we shared, didn’t you owe me at least that much?