Night work (16 page)

His cousin's wife, who had come with him instead of
Barot's young son, agreed with his assessment, and managed to
take the young bride aside for a private conversation at which phrases
such as "patience" and "a loving heart" and
"you will need to be your husband's backbone" played
a part. The earnest advice confused Pramilla somewhat, but lodged in
her heart, and her "auntie" assured herself that the child
would find them there and remember them when the time came. She patted
the child's cold hand and told her to remember that even the
great god Shiva was nothing without the energies of his wife, Shakti;
as she put
it:
"Shiva is
shava
[corpse] without
shakti" (shakti
being, Kate remembered from Roz's television panel, both the word
for energy and the name of the goddess). Pramilla nodded dutifully and
went back to take her place beside her pale, silent boy-husband.

The marriage might never have been consummated had Pramilla waited
for Laxman to make the first move. Indeed, it was not consummated in
the five days they spent in Delhi, waiting for Peter to finish his
business and for the authorities to come through with her travel
papers. But once on the airplane, sitting in the roaring, rattling,
utterly foreign compartment surrounded by poisonous smells,
incomprehensible voices, and a husband who, though exceedingly
beautiful, acted nothing like the
filmi
husbands she had seen
on the flickering screen in her village, or even her neighbors'
husbands, Pramilla Mehta watched in something close to terror as the
sprawl of Delhi fell away beneath the wings of the plane, and the girl
of not yet fifteen years began quietly to weep.

Had she plotted for days, she could not have come up with a better
way of making the boy at her side cleave to her. He had spent the last
week not far from tears himself, and twice had succumbed to them after
the unsatisfactory nightly ritual of going to this pretty
stranger's bedroom, sitting rigidly on the edge of her bed and
making attempts at conversation in a language she could barely
understand, and retreating again having done nothing but briefly touch
the back of her hand, once.

But now she was the one in tears, this delicate, precious, daunting,
sweet-faced young goddess, and without even pausing to consider his
action, he reached out and took her hand. In response she sobbed aloud,
and his heart simultaneously broke and swelled up in manly pride that
at last he had found a role he could step into, even if it was only
that of comforter.

Sleeping and awake, they held hands all the way to San Francisco.

IT WAS NOT EASY after that, and Pramilla was often in tears, but at
least she had the vague comfort of knowing that her sorrows were those
of all young wives, home in the village or here in this new country,
and that she had only to endure and life would, in the end, sort itself
out. Peter's wife, Rani, playing the part of mother in the family
(and indeed, she was nearly old enough to be Laxman's mother),
was hateful, even cruel, but that after all was what mothers-in-law
were. She refused to speak Hindi with the newcomer, pretending that she
did not understand the peasant girl's rural accents; she pinched
Pramilla's arm when the girl put the spoons in the wrong place or
failed to peel the vegetables to her satisfaction; worst of all from
Pramilla's point of view, Rani encouraged her own children (who
were not actually all that far from Pramilla's age) to mock her
and treat her as a rather stupid family pet. And Laxman... Her
husband was not a simple person to be with, since he seemed to know
that he had something missing and was short-tempered because of it. He
lost patience with her at the slightest irritation and occasionally
shouted and sometimes slapped her, and bed was never easy, since she
did not seem able to be anything but dry and tight against him. Still,
even that was a thing that her knowledge of village marriages had
prepared her for, and she soon folded away her picture of
filmi
romance as an outgrown (if never actually worn) garment.

So Pramilla Mehta went her way in the New World, walking a tightrope
between an inadequate and easily frustrated husband and an oppressive
mother-in-law figure, with no friends or family or even familiar
surroundings to bolster her. Tens of millions of women had done the
same, and like them, Pramilla could have been happier, but at least she
had the degree of contentment that comes when one's expectations
are met.

The precarious balancing act held for precisely five months, until
one evening when Rani, annoyed at some problem with a plumber and angry
at Peter for working such long hours, pointed out with a voice that cut
flesh that Laxman and 'Milla had been married for nearly half a
year, why wasn't the girl pregnant?

All four Mehtas ended up in a shouting match, which broke apart only
when Peter slammed out of the house, Rani turned her wrath on Pramilla,
and Laxman retreated from the scene. Later that night he came to his
wife's room expecting her to sniffle and cuddle and comfort him
by her need for his manly comforting. Instead Pramilla, still smarting
from Rani's cruel words and her own fresh, sharp fear of
childlessness, turned on him and demanded furiously why he, her
husband, had not been a real man and stood up for her against his
brother and sister-in-law.

Laxman went berserk. He hit her and screamed at her, forced himself
on her, and then collapsed in a storm of teary self-recrimination,
kissing her bruised face and saying over and over how she must never
again make him do that.

She never did. In the seven months that remained to her, she was
always careful, around him and around Rani (who conceived and
miscarried what would have been her fifth child).

The only outlets to Pramilla's spirit were the daytime
television programs, which taught her English with their simple plot
lines and
filmi
dialogue, and brief, uncertain conversations
with a woman who lived down the street and seemed to know everything
that was going on in Pramilla's life with Laxman.

Her name was Amanda, and she was a being even more exotic to
Pramilla than the people on the daytime television programs. She acted
more like a man than any woman Pramilla had ever known, allowing her
arms and legs to go bare--not like a prostitute, which was what
many of these women looked like, but like the castes of women who
carried stones and bricks to building projects, chattering loudly and
ignoring their veils--or like the pictures of women athletes
Pramilla had seen, strong and brazen. Pramilla couldn't
understand why men weren't afraid of Amanda; she looked as if she
would pull out a sword or a club at any moment, like Kali. She
certainly frightened Pramilla, she was so overflowing with Western ease
and power, and she fascinated Pramilla, because she was as strong and
confident as Peter. Her independence was... godlike.

They met at the local market, where Pramilla was puzzling over a
display of unfamiliar greenery. A bare, browned arm snaked past her to
snatch up a head of curly purple leaves, and paused to shake it under
Pramilla's nose.

"Great stuff," said the voice attached to the arm. "You ever try it?"

Pramilla glanced around to see if this stranger might not be
speaking to someone else, then looked up into a face as sunburnt and
roughened as that of a road-mender. She was as without manners as one
of the road gangs, too, bluntly informal in that way that was both
offensive and secretly appealing. Pramilla came up with a phrase her
sister-in-law had used on a similar occasion. "I beg your
pardon?" she said, but it did not come out the same way as Rani
said it, and this Western woman took it as an invitation.

"Purple kale, it's called," she continued
cheerfully. "Fry it for just a minute with butter and garlic,
it's gorgeous and healthy, too."

Pramilla's English was sufficient to gather that the woman was
telling her a recipe, although it sounded remarkably bland and nearly
raw. Pretty, though, if the purple stayed in the leaves. Perhaps she
could convince Rani to try it.

"Amanda Bonner," the woman said, and put the brown hand
out at Pramilla. Very gingerly Pramilla extended her own fingers,
allowing them to be clasped briefly and released.

"My name is Pramilla Mehta," she recited.

"Pramilla. What a beautiful name. You live down the block from
my parents, I think. I've seen you on the street."

"Parents, yes."

"Sorry--I'm talking too fast, aren't I? Can you understand my English?"

"Understand, yes. I do not speak good. I hear the television, when they talk slow."

"How long have you lived here?"

"Seven, eight month."

"Is that all? Did you know any English when you came?" Amanda asked, sounding surprised.

"Some little. Hallo, goodbye, Tom Cruise, Superman." Pramilla shrugged her narrow shoulders gracefully.

"Well, I wouldn't have thought TV could have much to
offer, but it obviously works for you. Do you watch the soaps?"

Pramilla knew that word from Peter's disparaging remarks.
"Yes, and cooking shows, news, cartoons. Game shows are too fast.
They make me tired."

Amanda laughed, showing a lot of white teeth. "They make me
tired, too, and I was born here. Your English is very good, though. You
must practice."

Pramilla grimaced. "I have to. No one will speak anything
else." Laxman knew little Hindi, Peter pretended he knew none,
and Rani treated the language as something only an Untouchable would
speak. It was English or go hungry.

"Immersion English, huh?" Amanda said and, seeing
Pramilla's confusion, changed it to, "We have a saying:
Sink or swim."

"I know," said Pramilla a touch grimly. "I know."

Chapter 9

"YOU GOT ALL THIS from Amanda--what's her
name?--Bonner?" Kate asked, since Roz seemed to have come to
a pausing place.

"Most of it. Some of it I asked Pramilla herself."

"You met her, then?"

"I did. On Thursday night, in fact, the day after I mentioned
her to you. Sweet little thing, looked about twelve years old, but
quite bright and nobody's fool. Amanda thought she might listen
to a woman who was also a priest."

"Listen to what?"

"Advice. Amanda thought the girl--I ought to call her 'y
^oun
g
woman," but it's hard to think of such a child that way.
Amanda thought she was being abused by her husband and his family, and
she wanted me to encourage Pramilla to get out before she found herself
with a broken arm, or worse. When I heard the details of the story, I
thought the 'or worse' all too likely. That file on bride
burning is something I've been compiling for years, and when I
saw the situation--a young bride far from her own support group,
married over a year and not pregnant, with signs of escalating violence
like the bruises on her arm where someone had grabbed her, hard--I
became extremely concerned. I was right, but I wasn't concerned
enough. I should have dragged her out of that house. Or gone there and
made a stink to let them know someone was watching. I will never
forgive myself that I did not."

"Roz, there's a mountain of guilt out there if you want
to crawl under it. And you're not even sure it wasn't an
accident, are you? Those damn garments they wear, I should think
they're massively dangerous around open flame, all that loose
silk waiting to catch on fire."

An odd expression took over Roz's features, memory wrestling
with an unwillingness to relinquish the self-blame. "She
didn't like cooking over electricity. She told us that. They had
to buy her a little kerosene stove because it was closer to what she
was used to. She could cook squatting on the floor."

Kate said nothing, merely meeting Roz's eyes and nodding. The
door behind them opened briefly and shut again; she became aware that
the temporary silence in the outer office had given way again to voices
and movement. The church members had returned from their dinner and
were awaiting the next commands of their beloved leader.

She closed her notebook and clipped the pen over the cover.
"I'll make some calls, let whoever caught the case know
that there's some question about it. And I'll try to have a
look at the autopsy report myself."

Roz opened her mouth--to object, Kate knew, to the proposed
noncommittal investigation--but was cut short by the door again,
this time with a voice asking if Roz was nearly finished, because if
so, that call that Roz had been waiting for...

Kate took advantage of the interruption to make her escape, but she
was followed out the door by Roz's voice, calling, "Talk to
Amanda, Kate. Hey, Jory? Give Kate Amanda Bonner's phone number,
would you? I'll talk to you tomorrow, Kate--and
thanks."

Roz obviously intended for Kate to leap right onto the case's
back, may even have intended for Kate to phone Amanda Bonner from the
office, but Kate was tired and hungry, so she went home.

Lee was in the kitchen making tantalizing smells to the sound of a
classical guitar CD. Kate slipped up behind the cook's back and
put her arms around Lee, just holding her, until Lee remembered that
something on the stove was about to become inedible (if not burst into
flames) and she unwrapped Kate's encircling arms, gently but
firmly.

"Jon's out again?" Kate asked, going to the cupboard for a couple of wineglasses.

"In and out. Sione has the night off, so they're going to a movie."

"Sione being...?"

"The dancer. From
Song.
Kate, you have been home this last week, you have heard about this."

"The dancer, right." The cause of Jon's falsetto
renditions of "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" and other gems
of the fifties and sixties. "How much longer is
Song
running?" she asked. It seemed a safe question, and relevant as
well, particularly if it was a traveling show and the current love of
Jon's life was going off with it.