Home To India (24 page)

“He is my husband,” she said. “How you dare come into my room like that?”

“Your husband, under the
chadhar
,” I said. “You know very well that widows never really remarry,” I couldn't help adding. She understood my insinuation; it made her furious.

“You are a witch,” she cried in Punjabi. “You have tried to turn him away from all of us. He's a different person now. Not the man who left for California two years ago. You have changed him. Still I understand him better than you do.” Then switching to English again, “All the time he is worried about what the memsahib will think. About your comfort. About this and that. He sits playing the sitar for you instead of attending to the farm properly. You have turned our lives upside down.” She paused for breath. Getting up from the charpoy, then, Dilraj Kaur stood confronting me, so that our faces were bare inches apart. “Where have you come from? Why don't you go back there?”

It was more than a question. It was a plea. She had used up her store of strength and energy. Even the fund of anger and hatred that fueled her words seemed exhausted. Now there were tears in her eyes, and I didn't wait to find out whether they were because of anger or distress, fury or despair. Whatever it was, I had no answer to her question. I left the room as quickly as I had entered. The shaft of moonlight lighted my way out.

“Well, that was a short talk,” Tej said when I got back to our room.

“It's your turn now,” I said. “I'm waiting to hear all the reasons why you're doing this to me. To us.”

“Doing what, for heaven's sake?”

“Betraying me; betraying our relationship,” I said, trying to blink back tears and not succeeding.

“You come barging into a room. Rush to judgments and decide I'm betraying you,” he countered. “You were really acting crazy with your craving for drama. I don't know what you thought you were doing.”

“Don't try to put
me
on the spot. I don't have to defend anything I've done. You're the one who has got us both to answer to. Dilraj Kaur and me. I never knew her until tonight. But I think I do now. She's fighting for her life and for her son's. She mistakenly thinks I'm out to ruin her, and she's trying to get me first she's tried everything. To isolate me from others in the family; to keep me away from family events—like your birthday today; to make me out to be some kind of concubine, with no status. She'd like to relegate me to the position of a whore and our kids, when we have them, to bastards. That way they'll have no claim. And now …”

“What rot are you talking?” he shouted. He seized me by the shoulders. Shook me. Stared into my eyes as one would stare into the eyes of a madwoman. Trying to fathom depths that the pupils refused access to.

“And now,” I went on, “she's got me where it hurts the most.…”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you think I didn't see her, half-naked, leaning over you and you sitting on her bed? What was I supposed to make of that?”

“Anything you like. But I will tell you. I saw her there on the veranda when I got back from the fields and thought I'd see if she was okay. She seemed to want to talk to me. I thought I ought to see what about, especially since she was unwell after feeding those villagers on my birthday and all.”

“Go on,” I said.

“She was just putting this around my neck when you came in. It's for my long life, she says. She brought it from a place of pilgrimage she visited with her brother. I humored her and …”

“It's nothing of the sort,” I exclaimed, lifting the amulet on its thread. “She got this from the sorceress, Veera Bai, tonight. I saw her with my own eyes. It's a love charm like Veera Bai hands out at these séances of hers,” I said, yanking it off the thread and throwing it across the room as hard as I could.

“What the …!” he exclaimed, grabbing my wrist. “What's the matter with you? Why don't you listen to me? Have I ever lied to you? Have I?” he cried, still holding me, willing me physically to say
no
.

But I couldn't say it. “How can I tell?” I said weakly. “After tonight.”

He let go of me then. “To hell with it,” he shouted. “To hell with you. I just want to get out of this madhouse. I thought you were someone special. Above stupid pettiness. Beyond kitchen feuds. Someone different from the general run. I thought
we
were special. Our relationship like no one else's.” He turned away from me and started toward the door. I put my hand on his arm to stop him.

“Why don't you level with me,” I said.

“Just leave me alone, will you? I was wrong about you. About us. There's nothing great about us. Never was. We were just ordinary people pretending not to be. You've never understood how I felt about you. Now it's gone. The feeling. Dead. I just want to get out of here.”

“It doesn't have to be like this, if you'd be honest with me,” I said again.

“We're going to be parents in another month or so. And you haven't even grown up yet!” he shouted.

“How about you? Resuming a relationship with that witch. While I'm pregnant and clumsy and unattractive. Or did you never break off with her?”

“What did you say!”

“Did you never break …”

“Break off? I'll show you what breaking off is,” he said in such a quiet voice now that I lost my breath waiting for what he was going to do next. “Nothing can get into your thick head,” he said, striding in silent fury over to the corner of our room where the sitar sat wrapped in its cloth cover beneath a photograph of Panditji. I can still see myself putting out my hands to stop him, saying “No! Don't do it! Don't …”

It all happened so fast, there was nothing to be done. Before I understood what was happening, he had pulled the instrument out of its cloth cover and had hurled it against the wall. It fell into bits on the floor.

What happened after that remains a muddle in my mind. To reconstruct the shattered moment of his leaving is impossible. Perhaps he pushed past me on his way to the door. It may have been that he grabbed some papers lying on the red steamer trunk and stuffed them into his briefcase before he went out. There was a brisk madness about his striding to the door, flinging it open, and rushing out. I didn't watch him go. I only heard the door slam shut. I sat down to think about how I was going to spend the next fifty years.

Not like
this
, anyway. I was sure of that. I could see myself heading out. Pregnant and all. Tonight. This morning. Before dawn. Before Tej got back from Ambala; before the others woke up. Heading out for
where
, I wondered. I observed myself busy about the room, keeping pace in physical acts with the speed of my racing mind, as it picked up and discarded alternative after alternative. I collected bits of the sitar off the floor by the wall where Tej had smashed it. Looking down at my hands, I was surprised to find pieces of gourd clutched in them. There was no putting the instrument back together again. But I collected all the pieces I could find and set them aside for I don't know what. The amulet, too, lay on the floor where I'd thrown it. I picked it up and tossed it into the old shortening tin I had turned into a wastebasket.

I got out the travel brochure I had picked up that day in Delhi. It was still in the little leather purse where I'd put it. The Golden Gate Bridge still hung suspended over the entrance to the Bay against a brilliant blue sky where it sat waiting to be crossed again by me. My mind was riding a whirligig of an idea: All it would take would be a telegram to Papa to send me the fare home. I wondered for a moment if that was the word to describe my parents' house anymore. If it was the place for a child of mine and Tej's to grow up in. A house without a father.

When I thought about it, the only place for our child to grow up in would be
our
house. Tej's and mine. But that didn't even exist as something I could picture. It certainly wasn't Majra. The powerful craziness of Dilraj Kaur had swept up everyone along with it; no one remained untouched. Everyone collaborated in this madness, driven by the fuel of her mania, misinterpreting it as religious fervor, superhuman loyalty to Tej, or simply indispensable usefulness. She had made it her house. Now she wanted to reclaim Tej as hers too. There was no space for me to breathe. I decided this was no place for our child.

I wished I had Aunt Teresa to talk to about all this. She could be depended upon to see everything straight. She had a way of knowing exactly what was going on.

I always thought it was because so much had happened to her in life. She had married early; lost every child she conceived; supported Uncle Oreste after his last accident on the job by taking in sewing to do. She over-ate, grew huge on polenta and cheap, red wine; shuffled around in bedroom slippers all day and stitched sacklike cotton dresses for herself that were more like tents than anything else. Coarse, curly, iron grey hair that had once been black. Soft, wrinkled cheeks. Varicose veins. High blood pressure. Aunt Teresa. She was ten thousand miles away. Writing to her wouldn't help. She was never too good at writing and never answered letters.

Finally, it would have to be Carol. One last letter to Carol before I took a blind leap into an uncertain future on my own. After this, there wouldn't be anything more to say, one way or another. Setting down my thoughts might help me decide between the possible and the impossible, and prove to be a remedy for the pain of indecision that nagged me.

As things were at that moment—only half an hour had gone by since Tej left—I had no idea which way to go. But go I had to.

Carol, Again

22

I suppose the most unsatisfactory part of remembering Helen Graziani is not knowing what eventually happened to her. Did she succeed in life, finally? Did she find what she was looking for? All I have to rely upon is this last letter of hers, which I've just found amongst the pile of papers I've been sorting through before moving to the new place. It's unlike any she had written before, full of self-doubt and indecision. And more than that: There's an urgency and desperation. With what or with whom is unclear. What was I supposed to do with what she wrote me? When I remember myself at that time, I'm struck with how unable I was to put myself in her place, to understand her predicament, what little she revealed of it. She wanted advice. But who was I to give it? I was in as much need as she was of direction, of guidance at that time. How was I supposed to respond? What action could I have taken? I've often been plagued with these questions because it seems to me there should have been something appropriate for me to do, besides replying to the letter. Which I did. But she never followed it up, and I never heard from her again.

Years ago, one or two friends from the Berkeley days, back from postwar reconstruction jobs with agencies in Europe, claimed they'd seen Helen during
Fasching
in Munich or in a Left Bank bookstore near Notre Dame, but that she'd disappeared from sight almost before their very eyes. If, indeed, it had been Helen.

I used to fancy we'd encounter one another somewhere, quite by surprise, in some unlikely place, she entering on a summer afternoon the Chartres Cathedral or Westminster Abbey or the Sistine Chapel by one door; I leaving it. Eschewing the tour groups, we'd each be alone, coming to individual grips with these architectural wonders. We'd laugh and talk and have an aperitif, perhaps a meal together somewhere. We'd recall the old days, promise to keep in touch.

Once I'd imagined both of us visiting our hometown together. I'd go off again with her on one of her bizarre excursions, to the outer limits of Los Angeles, to hear an Indian patriot give a speech or a dancer from Calcutta perform to the accompaniment of drums and cymbals and burning incense. To Helen, places far away always beckoned like lighted windows of home. She was forever heading out, even if it were only across town. If in San Francisco, we'd again try to find that Basque restaurant in North Beach we had once spent a whole Saturday in our freshman year trying to locate. I would then finally learn what exactly she went to India to find and whether, indeed, she found it.

Comparisons are almost impossible to avoid. And I admit one reason, the main reason, I was so obsessed with finding out the answer to this insistent question all along was to satisfy myself that I had gotten a better deal in life. I hasten to say that jealousy or envy has nothing to do with it. I thought too much of Helen for that; wished her too much good fortune. It's simply that what she did was altogether provocative. It turned upside down all our notions about ourselves, our values, our culture, our “progress,” our sheer power. Things we took for granted. She put them in question. With her sudden flight to an unfamiliar world she'd raised doubts that a lifetime could not put to rest. She ought not to have succeeded; she ought not to have gotten away with it. Otherwise, what did my own life prove? What did it add up to? A professorship, achieved at last after the males on the staff had been accommodated? An award or two? An honorary citation? An entry in the
Who's Who of American Scholars?
A couple of exchange professorships? An intended compliment once overheard, that I had a
masculine
mind; that no woman could
think
like I did?

My analyst has said I have particular difficulty in forming lasting relationships. I must say I have survived rather well without them. I have, in fact, found that when you lose a lover—through a quarrel, estrangement, or separation—your grief is anyway not so much at the loss of the other person as at the loss of your Self as “Lover.” This is especially so, if becoming a lover has long seemed a desire impossible of attainment and
being
a lover at last an unbelievably euphoric experience. The loss of the lover, then, is like a reaffirmation of your essentially love-less, lover-less state. Because it begins and ends with me, it's something I've always been able to handle, the Dante scholar notwithstanding.