Inheritance (13 page)

But even as she spoke thus, I began to think of his eyes and his hair and all the things I loved about him and his special tenderness toward me. I heard what Maria said but my thoughts were too distracted. I thought of his voice and his breath and the smell of his clothes, and I felt I could die right then and there, I had had something so beautiful in him. But then I guessed that I was succumbing to obsession, and it was all his fault. And my mother’s fault—for wasn’t it she from whom I’d inherited this passion? I had become as wanton as she was. I started to cry again, and Maria handed me a handkerchief and hugged me again.

I went to the temple thinking that perhaps Jani was on the right track, that perhaps religion was the answer for a disquieted mind. There was a group who sat next to me on the bus that also got off when I did, and it turned out that they, too, were going to the temple. The temple in
our town was a famous one, built in
A.D.
325. It featured a highly refined sculptural base depicting the entire story of the Ramayana and a legion of gods and goddesses on the remaining facades, I washed my hands at the tap and removed my sandals and went in. My group consisted of a widowed grandmother, her daughter or daughter-in-law, who had an infant in her arms, and two chattering ten-year-old girls, I applied a red dot to my forehead at the entrance.

What I best liked about this temple was the host of smells emanating from every corner. It was a mixture of incense oil, stone, and something else which I can only describe as godly presence. It was bewitching and always swept me into my better nature. I became more thoughtful, more full, somehow, tranquil and expansive. My group was doing a special puja, and I watched as they gave coconuts and bananas and flowers to the priest. He placed their offerings at the feet of the principal figure, praying aloud in Sanskrit and tearing up the flowers to scatter at the feet of the lesser deities. Then the camphor lamp was passed around, and I touched its warmth and then my eyes. The priest gave me a yellow chrysanthemum and handed my group their coconuts and fruit, now blessed.

This temple featured a small shrine for Sita, an avatar of Laxshmi; here she was depicted as a thoughtful companion to Rama, wife of the avatar of Vishnu and hero of the epic. Sita followed her husband into the forest
for fourteen years of exile and was abducted by the evil Ravana. Captive in his garden, but untouched because she was a goddess, she awaited rescue. When Rama finally reclaimed her as well as his kingdom, the people muttered that Sita was impure, having been separated from her husband and living in another man’s home. Required to take a test for purity, Sita walked through fire. But once her innocence was proved, her eyes blazed with anger at the injustice done to her, and she returned to the earth from which she’d sprung, leaving Rama.

I stood before the shrine to pray. I prayed for my grandmother’s good health, and Jani’s, and I prayed for the welfare of my cousins and my aunts. Finally, I asked the goddess for extra strength to see my mother as she truly was and to help me get over Richard’s absence. I prayed for forgiveness from the goddess, and I asked for a boon: to make my judgment clearer. I bowed before the goddess and then took a walk all around the temple.

I met my group as they collected their sandals. The girls were giggling, and the mother looked annoyed and the grandmother impatient. They went to a vendor and got sugarcane to munch on. I felt thirsty and unthinkingly drank from the tap. I was not ever to drink outside water, but I had forgotten. Immediately I wondered if I’d get sick, and I said an extra prayer to let this not come to pass.

I fed a banana to the elephant outside and took the bus home.

“What, my girl, you’ve been to the temple without anyone knowing?” asked my astonished grandmother. I nodded, feeling tired and a bit dizzy.

“I’m hungry. Can I have lunch?”

“We’ve eaten. I’ll get the cook to get you something. My God, this child went to the temple by herself! Come here! What were you thinking of?”

My grandmother hugged me to her bosom, and I breathed in the odor of her sari and her comfortable presence. She fetched me a plate of rotis and sweet potato. I ate quickly and still felt faintly ill.

I remembered the water from the tap but couldn’t begin to tell my grandmother anything.

The next day I awoke crying. I had lost Richard, I had no mother to speak of, and I had probably caught hepatitis from the temple tap water. I got up, sneaked out, and took the bus to see Maria again. On the way, a man with a sad face stared at me and moved next to my seat. My inner antennae went up like an ant’s that senses something amiss, while my mind told me not to be paranoid. The man began to mumble and leaned against me. I shoved him aside and found another seat. In panic, I wondered if because I had slept with Richard it meant that I was now sending a signal to random males that I was available for anything. The man continued to press against me in my mind, and I despaired at being female,
at being on a bus, and of making love long before I was old enough to appreciate the consequences.

“Sonil,” said Maria when I was seated on her sofa, “we search for love all our lives just as we search for family all the time. And whenever we take on anyone as a friend, we also take on their families and their history. This does not have to be a bad thing. It broadens our sense of self. Letting Richard into your life was not a sin. In fact, nothing is good or bad, and we don’t really need to judge at all …”

Again I drifted off and looked at her bungalow. It seemed nice, with its heavy brocade drapes and trailing plants hung from the ceiling. The light was good and her furniture, dark mahogany, Raj style, looked settled. I liked her cushions made from pallus, the richly embroidered borders of saris. Maybe someday if I had my own apartment, I could live well and have people to visit. Maybe I could keep a lover or keep a dog. I wondered if I would need a lot of money for such a life

“… In America, if you have a heartbreak you can tap into a network of female sympathizers, women who will listen to your problems about men and offer solutions. Even girls your age discuss such things. There are magazines that cater to this sort of trouble, with questions and answers about boyfriend problems, quizzes on compatibility. It’s quite an industry. Indian girls must talk about these things, too.”

I supposed girls my age rhapsodized over film stars or a cricket player, occasionally a cousin or a brother’s friend. But marriage at a suitable age was always the target, always an aim, an outcome that restricted behavior somewhat. Of course, there were stories of girls sneaking off from college to meet their beaus, kissing at train stations, but the large majority of my classmates would acquiesce to arranged marriages and start families within three years of the wedding.

But what if no one ever loved me again, or if I never loved anyone again? Would I be as unlucky in love as my mother? I felt doomed.

“I wouldn’t worry about all those things, Sonil. I would forgive myself for being in love with Richard and move on. You have so much life ahead of you, my God, so much to explore and accomplish.”

But I couldn’t see past Richard. I desperately wanted him next to me, immediately, always. I said goodbye to Maria and turned toward home, but then changed my mind and went into a cafe.

I thought about animals and their capacity for change, how species evolved one after another, left and right, front and back. I thought about continual reproduction, and what that meant in terms of survival. And I began to think of the ability to abstain from love as a peculiarly human trait. But then, that couldn’t be true, I thought; surely there were earthworms that were monkish in their habits?

Why didn’t I abstain? Why didn’t my mother? Why could she not follow the proper path of widowhood? Why couldn’t she remain content with who she was? What was so bad in being a proper widow? “A widow is nothing in our society. Unable to remarry, unable to entertain, always an eyesore, a begrudged extra plate,” one of my teachers had lectured in class. But was that always the case? Why did she need to entertain anyway?

Now, knowing Richard, I saw how sweet it was to lie with someone. Still, could she not hold off? Of course, I wouldn’t have been born if she had held off, if she had remained satisfied with her life. I think dissatisfaction makes us impatient with the slow pace of natural progression, propels us forward. Of course, this dissatisfaction could be good … Survival might depend upon it. But maybe it would have been better if I hadn’t been born.

“Hey, professor, what are you thinking?”

It must be my fate to be accosted in cafes. I looked up. It was C.P.’s cousin who liked cricket.

“Nothing,” I said. “How are you?”

“I just finished a game. The boys here are not bad.”

“I’m sorry about C.P.,” I said, immediately wishing I hadn’t.

“Did she really go off to a convent?” he said, admiringly.

I nodded.

“Wow.”

“Yes.”

“What are you studying?”

“First year P.U.C.”

“I’m in eleventh standard.”

We had run out of conversation, I thought, but Murthi, C.P.’s cousin, began to talk of a movie he had seen, which made me say that I wanted to see it, too. He said his sister was going with her friends and did I want to go; he could ask her to ring me? And to all this I answered yes, why not? I gulped my milk and thought, To hell with Richard.

The movie was a good one, a regular weepy epic with lots of drama, two heroines and two heroes, five villains, all taking place near a temple and a hill station in India. A Hindi film with good songs, and when the front row audience began to sing along, Murthi’s sister and her friends began to giggle and I giggled, too. But in the second half, the hero reminded me of Richard, and I cried and hoped no one noticed. I began to wish I had never met Richard, that I was still an innocent girl, like the girls around me who were shy about certain subjects.

After the movie we went out for espresso and ice cream, and the girls discussed the film and their friends. They didn’t pay too much attention to me, so I was left to dream on.

I began to fashion a Richard from my memory of him. In my inner world he was even more attentive, more alluring than he had been in reality. He had been gone two weeks. I dreamed up long conversations with him, scenarios in which I spoke my own mind clearly and at length. He replied with utter devotion, a multitude of compliments. For a while I waited to receive a letter from him, but none arrived. I reasoned that he might have thought it dangerous to send mail to me at my grandmother’s, that it would arouse suspicious attention.

“Why don’t you begin a project—some drawing?” asked my grandmother.

I said no, I didn’t want to draw.

“Do a painting for me,” she sweetly suggested.

I had drawn those mandalas for her but she never knew. I decided to attempt some painting, but my paints looked dull. Great-uncle had some better colors, and dispiritedly I borrowed his and sat down to paint.

I tried some images of girls, having learned from one of my classmates how to draw a quick portrait. I had small squares of paper, also borrowed from Great-uncle. Idly, then more seriously, I began to draw some portraits of Richard. I drew his broad forehead, his strong nose, his quick smile. I drew from a memory that seemed to have been burned into my mind. As I drew I felt myself ache with longing. I forgot the verandah, the birds, the house, Grandmother. I had completely entered the world
of my dreams, where time stood utterly still. I was with Richard in my mind. It was almost like dying and entering another dimension. But somehow I snapped myself out of this trance and was conscious that I had lost minutes. I was surprised to see the sun high in the sky and to hear my grandmother calling me to lunch.

Meanwhile, my mother began to disappear in the evenings, too. Usually, she ate her meals alone on the verandah. After my supper, Grandmother would set her a plate of food. Sometimes my mother would take her plate to the garden, where she surreptitiously sipped wine. But for a few nights, she missed her evening meal; late at night I’d hear the garden gate creaking open and my mother entering the compound. I began to notice that she disappeared on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Sometimes she came home laden with lilac. Blooms of wet purple were cradled in her arms, and a strange smile floated on her lips. I knew then she had gone to visit her friend the poet.