Sister of My Heart (17 page)

WHENEVER I’VE BEEN
to the Kalighat temple before this, it has been a cacophony of human and animal clamor—priests yelling and shoving at confused temple-goers who mill around like sheep, vendors calling out their wares, lost children wailing, crippled beggars crying for alms, goats bleating as they are dragged to sacrifice. So it seems eerily quiet this dawn, only the sweepers washing the steps of the temple, and the first flower sellers setting up garlands of bright orange marigolds and jasmines white as new-cooked rice. I buy a hibiscus garland, red like the sindur that married women wear, and make my way in.

The stone vault which houses the deity is dim with incense and holy mystery. Later in the day it will be crowded to suffocation, but for now things are quiet, so the priest allows me to stop before the gleaming black image. Since morning I have been rehearsing prayers, all the things I want, but now as I look at the huge eyes of the goddess, rimmed in gold and red, I cannot remember any of them. The goddess appears a little displeased—she knows I have used her as an excuse for a rendezvous of a very different nature. But after all she herself has known love. It is said in the Puranas that she left home against the wishes of her father to follow Lord Shiva, her beloved. So I think she forgives me. When I lay my head on the silver pedestal at the foot of the image, it is cool and smells of sandalwood paste, and I feel comforted.

I see Ashok as soon as I come out. As agreed, he is standing
by the Shiva shrine at the far end of the temple. It is the first time we have met alone, and I grow unexpectedly shy when he takes me by the hand and leads me to an alcove. But time is short—Singhji, who is waiting outside, has told me that we should return home within the hour—so my shyness will have to wait until our wedding night.

“Are you well?” Ashok asks me, looking closely at my face. “Did they come for the bride-viewing already?”

I nod wordlessly. He himself appears somber, as though the decision to marry has propelled him into adulthood. There is a new line between his brows. I want to smooth it away. I want to kiss him. I want to laugh and cry, all at once. Finally I say, “They’ve set the wedding date a month from now.”

Ashok thinks carefully, counting on his fingers. Then he says, “Your mother’s turned down my offer once already. There’s no way she’ll agree to our marriage, now that you’ve received a more ‘suitable’ proposal. We must elope.”

My heart heaves with panic.
Elope
. I am dizzy at the finality of the word, like a door slammed behind me for good. They will disown me. Never again to enter that old marble mansion that has always been home, never again to see the mothers, never to hold my dear Anju close, for comfort and for joy. Can I bear it, even for Ashok’s sake?

“We’ll do it in two weeks, as soon as you turn eighteen,” says Ashok. “That way your mother can’t force you to return, or annul the marriage.”

“How did you know when my birthday was?” I ask, amazed.

For a moment he looks mysterious. “I have my ways!” But then he gives in to a smile—already he cannot keep secrets from me—and says, “I asked Singhji.”

I hadn’t realized Singhji kept such close count of my birthdays. But Ashok is giving me details: where we’ll go, who’ll perform the wedding, how long we must remain in hiding afterward. Singhji has promised to help. I need bring nothing with me. Ashok is confident that his parents would take me in—even
before the wedding, if he asks. But to protect them from my mother’s accusations, he will not tell them of our plans until the marriage has taken place.

“Don’t look so worried, Sudha. Don’t you trust me?”

I touch that dear crease between his brows. His skin smells of a soap whose name I do not know. “I trust,” I say and sway toward him. That is how we kiss our first kiss, behind the great black Shiva Lingam. His lips are a shock of heat. His fingertips linger on my throat. For the rest of my life, passion will mean the smell of crushed hibiscus and champak incense, this prickling in my palms, this damp slippery stone under my feet.

Then, out of the corner of my eye, just out of focus, I see a young woman, quite lovely, dressed in a village cotton sari—an old-fashioned design one does not see nowadays. Next to her is a tall, fair stranger, his fingers still red from the wedding sindur he has just put on her forehead. He turns her audaciously to him for a kiss—he must be a rule-breaker too. Her body takes on a shivering, like a flowering tree in a spring wind, and over her face, which is oddly familiar, flit joy and regret and excited fear. I swing around urgently—I must find out who they are—but they have vanished.

No matter. In my bones I know them—the shades of my parents, impressions left in this temple air from their marriage day twenty-one years ago. Did they appear to remind me of their story? Or to warn me about mine?

Daughter and mother, mother and daughter. Though we would like to think otherwise, how our lives echo each other’s.

When I look back from the temple gate, Ashok is still standing near Shiva’s shrine. Soundlessly, he mouths something. I watch the shape of his lips saying
my wife
, and my heart dissolves into honey. Two weeks. How can I live for two whole weeks without him?

I lie on the newly washed terrace floor, the matting cool against my skin, and stare at the night sky. The darkness is diluted by the lights that seep upward from this never-sleeping city. I would ask Anju the names of the constellations that glow faintly through the haze, but she has fallen asleep, her head on my pillow, her breath warm and moist on my cheek, and smelling of cloves. So I repeat to myself the only one I know, Kalpurush, the black warrior with his curved, glittering sword.

I am sleepy too, but I force myself to stay awake. I am looking for falling stars. I need two of them, just at midnight, because I must make two wishes. One for myself and one for Anju—because today a promising proposal has arrived for her from a reputable Calcutta family, the Majumdars, whose only son works in America.

Not that Anju believes in falling stars. They are nothing more, she says, than burning meteors which have no power to help anyone, not even themselves.

I know. But I know also that there may be many sides to something all at once, many realities. A ball of flaming gas hurtling to its doom can, if you believe strongly enough, give you your heart’s desire. The death of a star, the birth of a new joy in your life. Isn’t that how the universe balances things?

I have not said this to Anju. How hard it is to explain wondrousness—even to her whom I have loved since birth. I hope she understands, though sometimes I wonder if true understanding is ever possible between people.

Earlier tonight when we stole up to the terrace after dinner, and I told her what Ashok and I had decided, I was certain she would be delighted for me. Instead she was distraught.

“Sudha, that’s too big a risk. What if things don’t turn out the way he says they will? All you have is his word that he’ll marry you once you run away with him. What if “—she hesitated, then plunged ahead—”what if he has his way with you and then changes his mind?”

“I
know
he’s telling the truth. I
know
I can trust him.” I felt the anger shoot through my veins like a poison. “You don’t know what love is, that’s why you can say something so mean—”

Anju let my accusation pass. “Sudha, listen to me,” she said patiently. “Even if he’s telling the truth, or what he believes to be the truth, there’s no guarantee his parents will take you into their home. If your mother had accepted their proposal, it would have been different. But now you’ll be a runaway girl who’s lost her reputation. From a family that’s already antagonized them. What if they don’t recognize your marriage?”

She was putting into words the fears that had jostled unshaped inside me all day. Perhaps that was why I put my hands over my ears and cried, “Enough. I won’t allow you to slander Ashok. I’ve made up my mind about what I’m going to do, and that’s that!”

Anju stopped then. She bit her lip hard to keep in the words that wanted to pour out, the angry words, the cautionary words, the loving words. For of course she knew what love was, my sister who would have given all her happiness for mine. “I’ll have to help you then, I guess,” she said.

Later we talked about Anju’s possible marriage to the young man who would be arriving soon from America. All we knew about him was his name—Sunil—and his occupation—a computer scientist. Anju confessed that she was scared. My heart ached to hear that, my brave cousin who had never been afraid of anything in her life.

“To think that I’ll have to go and live with a stranger. That I’m supposed to belong to some man I haven’t even met as soon as he puts a garland around my neck. Oh, why can’t I just remain single? Why must I be yoked to a man like a cart to a buffalo?”

I sighed in sympathy. I would have been afraid too, if Ashok had not saved me. I tried to point out the good sides of marriage to her. A home which in time she would come to rule. A man to wake her with moonlight kisses, to glance at her across a roomful
of people with a heat in his eyes that would shake her heart for joy. The babies, with their sweet milk-and-cinnamon smell, to sing to sleep at her breast.

“Milk-and-cinnamon, hah! Dirty nappies, dripping with pee and worse, that’s what babies smell like,” said my unmaternal cousin. But perhaps she felt a little better, for she threw an arm around me and went to sleep.

I couldn’t sleep, though. The morning’s thoughts kept ricocheting in my head, all I would lose when I gained Ashok’s love. Anju’s arm, soft with sleep, circled my neck. Regret welled up in my mouth, bitter as the quinine Pishi used to dose us with. I, the renegade daughter. Would I even be allowed to see Anju again?

Now Anju frowns in her sleep, battling the demons of her dream world just as she has always fought, in her waking life, anyone who will not let her be herself. I smile a little, but inside I am crying. O my Anju, you who have never learned to bend with the wind, what will happen if you marry the wrong kind of man?

Carried from afar by the night breeze, I hear chimes. It is the clock at St. Paul’s Cathedral, beginning to strike twelve. And suddenly we are plunged into total darkness, an ocean of ink. For a moment I am startled into terror. But it is only one of the power outages that plague us throughout the year in Calcutta.

The darkness is a cresting wave. It sweeps me up out of my body until I float among the stars, those tiny bright pores on the sky’s skin. If only I could pass through them, I would end up on the other side, the right side, shadowless, perfectly illuminated, beyond the worries of this mundane world.

I hear the clock again. Its relentless chimes force me back into the cramped confines of my body. Midnight is almost gone. I search the sky desperately. Then, on the last strike I see it, a flash to the left, a small scar of light, already healing, my falling star.

But only one.

One star for one wish.

Opposing desires battle in my heart for Anju and me, pulling me this way and that. But finally I ask for a wonderful marriage
for my cousin, a husband whom she will love with all her being. I know I will have to pay for my wish, for that is the way of this world on the wrong side of the sky, where there is never enough happiness for all of us.

Ashok, Ashok
, cries a receding echo in my heart.

Still, I am glad that I gave my wish to Anju.

On the breath-end of that wish, just as the star burns out, comes a startling thought. If only Anju and I, like the wives of the heroes in the old tales, could marry the same man, our Arjun, our Krishna, who would love and treasure us both, and keep us both together.

It is a ridiculous wish, maybe even immoral. But before I can take it back, I am interrupted by Pishi’s heavy steps as she pants her way up the stairs, scolding us all the while for being here by ourselves, under the clammy night dew that is sure to make us sick, when all good young women in Calcutta are fast asleep in their beds.

OUR STARS
must be really well aligned this month, Aunt N keeps saying. First Sudha’s marriage is all set, then I get a proposal, and now someone wants to buy the bookstore.