Secret Keeper (4 page)

Bontu was Uncle’s nickname, and even though he was middle- aged, married, and the father of three children, Grandmother still fussed over him as though he were a schoolboy. Neither of her sons could do wrong in her eyes. Bintu was her nickname for Baba, and if anything, she seemed to dote on her younger son even more than she did on his brother.

After receiving her granddaughters’ pronam, Grandmother took Asha’s chin and tilted it up with her fingertips. “Looks just the same, even though she’s a woman now,” she announced, letting go and shrugging. “She’ll never be a beauty, this one.”

Asha felt as though she’d been slapped. Her own grandmother telling her how ugly she was? She couldn’t remember being appraised like this during their last visit. But of course she had been a child then, not a
woman.

Grandmother turned to Asha’s sister, eyes lingering on Reet’s face and shape, taking in the sight as though she’d just lifted the lid of a velvet box. “And how is the pearl of the family?” she asked, stroking Reet’s cheek. “So lovely! So fair!”

Asha’s hands clenched and unclenched as she fought to control her tongue. At Bishop Academy, their teachers warned the girls not to focus on outside appearances. “Character,” students were taught. “Wisdom. Discipline. Courage. Those are the true womanly qualities that stand
the test of time.” Asha’s fierce determination to succeed had won the admiration of teachers and students alike. But the feminine attributes that seemed to count in her paternal grandparents’ house had always been skin-deep. And she obviously didn’t have enough of them.

“I’m fine, Grandmother,” Reet was saying. “You look just the same as you did four years ago, and so does Auntie, but who are these huge creatures?”

She ruffled the hair of the cousins, who were clustering around her. Sita and Suma were twins, not identical but plain and dark- skinned and skinny, just like Asha.

“Where’s Rajiv?” Ma asked. Rajiv was the one cousin who was close to their age, and the only boy of the house. He was seventeen, like Reet, and the girls called him Raj for short.

“At college, of course,” Auntie answered proudly. “He studies so hard, that boy.”

“Not hard enough,” Grandmother added, acknowledging Ma’s pronam with a nod. “Lazy, that one is. And his father so hardworking, too!” Her eyes raked over her older daughter- in- law as though she knew exactly where the laziness in her grandson’s character originated.

“He’s a good boy, your son,” Ma told Auntie. “Has he put on some weight? He was always so thin.”

She was using proper Bangla, polished and beautiful, just as she had with the Bengali families in their Delhi social circle. When it was just the four of them at home, Ma slipped into an odd, nasal pronunciation and slang village words that Baba and the girls understood but didn’t use themselves. To Asha’s ears, the public version sounded as if
her mother were acting; her at- home Bangla was sweeter and easier to obey.

“I feed my son plenty of food,” Auntie answered, obviously taking Ma’s words personally. “He’s growing up nicely.”

Suma, the more verbal of the twins, piped up. “He plays cricket all the time. We never see him studying.”

“Hush!” Auntie snapped. “Don’t talk about your brother like that.”

Suma’s face fell at her mother’s rebuke.

“
My
boys were always top of their class,” Grandmother said. “A woman’s greatest duty and privilege is to see that her son succeeds.”

Auntie glowered at Grandmother’s correction, and Ma flinched almost imperceptibly as she took the jab at her son-less status. Asha and Reet exchanged glances. The cousins had grown, the tight bun of hair on Grandmother’s head was almost completely gray, and Auntie had put on a few pounds. Otherwise, things were just as they remembered-the air simmering with tension between Grandmother and her daughters- in- law, competition between the wives as thick as luchi dough. And this time, there was no Baba to make the peace.

FIVE

R
EET AND
A
SHA WERE SHARING A ROOM WITH
S
ITA AND
S
UMA
until Baba sent for them. It had no door; only a curtain for privacy. Their cousin Raj had a small room to himself, with a door to shut.
Lucky bum,
Asha thought.
Gets a space of his own just because he’s got different body parts than we do.

All four granddaughters were expected to sleep together, stacked sideways across the same bed under one large mosquito net. It was the bed that Baba and Uncle had shared when they were boys.
Probably the same mosquito net, too,
Asha thought, feeling almost as desperate for privacy as the beggars in Howrah station were for food.

The household’s daily routine left hardly any time for solitude. After breakfast, Uncle headed to work and Raj to college. Grandmother bustled in and out, ordering the
servants around and taking one small granddaughter on her lap at a time to comb out and braid her hair. Once the twins left for school, the three older women gathered in the living room to knit and embroider, staying under the fans as the heat intensified. Ma made it clear that Reet and Asha were expected to join them.

While Reet entertained by singing or gossiping about the latest film celebrities, Asha curled up in a corner of the room and read. She’d brought along a few favorites from her childhood: her dog- eared copy of
Grimms’'Fairy Tales,
a few of Enid Blyton’s books, and E. Nesbit’s
The Enchanted Cjastle, T he Railway Cjhildren,
and
Five Children and It.

Thankfully, here in Calcutta, her professor- grandfather’s glassed- in bookcase was stocked with Shakespeare, Dickens, Milton, and Trollope. Asha was working her way through them, though some weren’t easy reads. His wise, loving presence in the house was growing as dim as the light filtering through the banana leaves, and she liked the way the books connected her to him.

An hour or so before noon, Auntie would rouse herself and head to the kitchen to oversee the preparation of lunch for her husband and son. A man on a cycle waited outside for tin containers full of steaming rice and fish curry and lentils that he delivered to Uncle’s office and Raj’s college. Shortly after that, the younger cousins came home, and then the house grew still as Auntie, Ma, Reet, and Grand mother rested and the little girls napped.

That was when Asha seized her chance. Taking her diary, she tiptoed up the stairs to the roof and closed the door quietly behind her. The flat cement roof was enclosed on all
four sides by a low wall. Asha walked to the front of the house and looked down on the large field across the road. From the opposite wall, she glimpsed a pond behind a banyan tree, and the cricket fields and buildings of her cousin’s college in the distance. To the sides were the neighbors’ houses, one higher and the other lower. The afternoon sky stretched overhead from horizon to horizon, and when Asha looked up, she felt as if she were in a quiet, hot balloon. Even the crows were resting from the heat of the day.

Tall coconut trees between their house and the taller house next door provided a bit of shade, and Asha sat cross-legged in the biggest patch of it. Finally she was alone, and she inhaled huge breaths of sunlight and open air. The atmosphere was thick and wet, making sweat pour down her neck into every nook of her body, but Asha didn’t care. She started writing.

Asha paused to flick the sweat from the crook of her elbow. Suddenly she caught sight of a face staring at her through the coconut leaves. It was on the fourth story of the house next door, only a few feet away from the Guptas’ roof. Even as she turned, though, the shutters closed and the face disappeared, leaving behind an impression of an intense gaze.

The stately four- story house and garden next to the Guptas’ was the most expensive property in the neighborhood. The family who used to live there had moved to England since Asha’s last trip to Calcutta and someone else
had taken over.
Someone who likes to spy on other people,
Asha thought, frowning. She shrugged and kept writing, irritated by her lack of privacy even up here.

“Osh, time for tea!” Reet’s voice called from the stairwell below.

Asha locked her diary and tucked the key back under
her salwar kameez. She didn’t want anybody other than her sister to start asking questions regarding her whereabouts. Just before she left the roof, she noticed that the shutters of their neighbor’s fourth- story room were slightly ajar, as though someone had opened them just enough to see and not be seen.

Male voices joined the conversation over tea, as Uncle and Raj returned from work and college. The little girls grew tired of paper dolls and begged their cousin to read them a story. Asha always agreed. She had been one of Bishop Academy’s elocutionary stars, and had inherited Baba’s flair for timing and delivery. Ma, Grandmother, Reet, and Auntie would stop chattering while she read aloud or told a story. Even Uncle and Raj listened.

Fairy tales were her favorite read- alouds; she’d analyzed her love for them in her diary. Was it because evil was always vanquished at the end? Was it because the most unlikely characters stuck in the worst quandaries sometimes got their happy endings? She loved the Bengali folktales, too, and their version of a rakosh, or monster, which was usually slain by a weak underdog-the runt of a family, the village fool, or even a small bird named Tuntuni.

Conscious of her small cousins taking in the fairy tales with wide eyes, Asha did the same sort of editing that she did silently for herself. She had developed the skill of sending her eyes skimming two or three sentences ahead of her
voice. Without skipping a beat, she replaced phrases like “the most beautiful girl in all the kingdom” with “the sweetest and kindest girl in all the kingdom,” left out as much description as she could of female physical at tributes, and completely obliterated words and phrases like “fair” and “white skin.” Nobody listening seemed to notice, and Asha figured the Grimm brothers wouldn’t mind. Their prin cesses and peasant girls got slightly more noble, smart, generous, and brave, and less physical, that was all. The Tuntuni stories she could tell just as Baba had told her. They didn’t need editing because the bird’s success didn’t rely on looks but on clever tactics.