Sister of My Heart (33 page)

WHEN I WAKE
from my afternoon nap, the sun has painted the walls of my bedroom a gentle gold. I rub my eyes, trying to remember the dream I had, something soft and warm like the quilt I am curled under, but it plays hide-and-seek at the edge of my mind and will not let itself be caught. I stretch, catlike—no, more like a tigress. I am filled with power and potency and well-being, with the beauty of my sleek, ripe body.

I come downstairs and join my mother-in-law, who’s having her evening tea. “Had a good nap?” she asks pleasantly, then calls, “Oh, Dinabandhu, bring Bau Ma some cha.” Now that I’m expecting, she has taken to a more affectionate form of address. She even puts down the paper she’s reading to chat with me until the steaming cup of ginger tea, reputed to be particularly excellent for pregnant digestive systems, arrives.

Since the pregnancy, my mother-in-law’s taken over a lot of my duties. She doesn’t want me bending over a hot unun, or lifting sacks of rice and lentils from the storage room, or running up to the terrace to check on the pickles set out in the sun.

“You should let me do some of it, Ma,” I say sometimes, feeling guilty. “I feel useless—and bored.”

“My dear!” Her eyes take on a dewy softness, as they often do nowadays. “What are you talking about! You’re doing the most useful thing of all. And as for bored, why don’t you ask Ramesh’s brothers to run to Biren’s shop and pick up a new video movie for you?”

Yes, now that I am pregnant, all things—within the boundaries of my mother-in-law’s notions of seemliness—are permitted to me. I can ask my brothers-in-law to run errands for me. I can sleep in late and lie down in the afternoons, and no one is to disturb me. Should I wish to be alone, I can go to the balcony and sit in the shade of the neem tree as long as I want. Women get moody at this time, my mother-in-law will whisper to the maids. They have to be humored. At mealtimes I am served first, even before Ramesh. After all, as my mother-in-law dryly remarked once, his job is done. I am given the best portions—the coveted fish heads stewed with lentils and sprinkled with lemon, the crisp, golden-brown fried brinjals, the creamy top layer of the rice pudding that I love. When my mother-in-law called Calcutta to tell them my news, she asked Pishi about my favorite dishes. Now she makes sure Dinabandhu cooks at least one of them every day.

At times, embarrassed, I try to protest.

“Eat, eat, Bau Ma,” smiles my mother-in-law, counting out, by my plate, the expensive prenatal vitamin tablets she’s had shipped from Dey’s Medical Stores in Calcutta. “Remember, you’re eating for my grandson, too.” Even the fact that Ramesh, back from a trip to Murshidabad, has brought me a whole boxful of the silk saris which the region is famous for, does not bother her. Perhaps she thinks they are keeping her grandson warm.

At night after dinner we all sit and watch video movies. My mother-in-law likes me to watch comedies, or holy stories from the Ramayana. They’ll have a good effect on her grandson’s personality, she says. She was not pleased the other day when Ramesh’s brothers brought a video of the Rani of Jhansi, the widow-queen who led a rebellion against the British in the 1850s and died valiantly on the battlefield. Too much bloodshed, she complained. But I was fascinated. The Rani was so wondrously brave. When the priests proclaimed that as a childless widow she should devote her life to prayers, she boldly told them that her subjects were her children and she had to take care of them. She
donned male garb and, a sword in each hand, led her soldiers into battle. Even when her forces were overwhelmed by the British guns, she didn’t give up. Fallen on the battlefield with a fatal wound, she scintillated with a desperate, abandoned joy. I watched that movie twice.

“I guess it’s all right for queens to be that way,” said my mother-in-law. “But I much prefer someone womanly and gentle-natured like our Bau Ma!”

Sweetness, sweetness all around, and yet why do I feel dissatisfied? Why does the inside of my mouth pucker up as though I have bitten into a sour plum? My mother says I should be down on my knees, forehead to the floor, giving thanks that my in-laws are so caring. But as I walk the prescribed mile around the terrace in the evenings, I cannot seem to forget that measuring look in my mother-in-law’s eyes when I couldn’t get pregnant. I am even suspicious of Ramesh. The most innocent of his questions—do I feel nauseous anymore, would I like him to rub my back—raises my hackles. If in bed he slips a hand, careful and cupped, over my belly, I shrug it away impatiently, though I know I’m hurting his feelings. All of this love and caring, I want to shout, is it for Sudha, or for the carrier of the new heir of the Sanyals?

Stupid girl, my mother would say. What’s the difference?

But there
is
one. I sense it. Walking around the terrace in the suddenly sad evening hour when the stars seem very far and dim, I wish Anju were here. With her keen logic, she would find the right words to give shape to my misgivings. She would tell me that I am right.

Chief among my inscrutable mother-in-law’s inscrutable actions is this: She has kept my pregnancy a secret. Except for the mothers and Anju, no one outside our household knows. Not even Aunt Tarini.

“I was sure she’d send her a telegram, first thing, with an even
bigger box of sweets than the one Aunt gave us,” I say to Ramesh one day when he comes home early to join me on my evening terrace walk. (He’s allowed to do such things now.) But he too cannot figure it out.

“Maybe she’s afraid of you getting the evil eye from envious people. Or maybe she’s decided not to stoop to Aunt’s level anymore,” he replies. “Maybe she promised that to Goddess Shashti if she gave her a grandson.”

“That’s the other thing that bothers me,” I say irritably. “The way she’s so sure it’s going to be a boy. What if it isn’t?”

“Let’s hope it is, or else she’ll surely blow a gasket,” says my engineer husband. The image, applied to my dignified mother-in-law, is so ridiculous that it makes us both break into guilty laughter.

Today as I finish my tea, my mother-in-law slides an aerogram across the table at me.

“From Anju,” she says, as though I had not recognized that pale blue I’ve come to love. “I hope your cousin is well. It must be hard for her, all alone in that faraway country, without a mother or mother-in-law to help her through this time,” she adds, kindly.

She has grown very kind recently, my mother-in-law.

Maybe I am being unnecessarily hard on her. Maybe this
is
her real nature, and that other, during those doctor visits and that afternoon at the shrine, was the cruelty that sometimes rises in us when we are desperate.

“If you don’t mind,” I say, standing up, “I’ll read it as I take my evening walk.”

“Not at all, Bau Ma, you go ahead,” she says. As I start up the stairs, she calls from behind, “Don’t stumble on anything though, while you’re busy reading.”

As always, I can hear Anju’s voice in her letter. Amused,
extravagant, frank—and right now, very, very happy. She tells me how strange it feels to be pregnant, how she loves and hates it at the same time. How sometimes when she’s alone she takes off her clothes and stands in front of the mirror, examining the changes—the dark line of hair pointing downward from the navel, the nipples dark and glistening as the prunes she soaks overnight for her constipation, the luscious, obscene swell of her abdomen.
Am I breathtakingly beautiful, Sudha, or overwhelmingly ugly? I can’t decide
. I smile.
Beautiful, Anju
, I whisper into the sheet. She scolds me because I haven’t sent her a photo of myself in return for the one she mailed me last month. I sigh. I’ll have to explain to her that my mother-in-law thinks taking photos at this time brings bad luck.

When Anju tells me how Sunil has changed, I am glad for her. Perhaps now I will be able to shrug off that faint unease I have been carrying since the wedding, my fear that Anju needs him more than he needs her. The anticipation of fatherhood seems to have wrought a remarkable transformation in him. He thinks nothing of driving clear across town to Mumtaz Cuisine to fetch her fresh-made rasogollahs, her latest craving. In the evenings he massages her swollen feet with pine oil. He’s already opened an account at his credit union—not that they have anything to put in it—for the baby.
He’s like one of those hundred-year redwoods he took me to visit
, Anju writes,
with their woodsy-smelling barks that you just can’t stop yourself from leaning on
.

The part I love best is when Anju writes about her baby. He/ she is big as a lemon now—she knows this from her pregnancy book. The last time she went to the doctor, she listened to the baby’s heartbeat. It was like a runaway engine, full of furious energy. That’s when she realized how much she loved this little creature inside her, more a part of her life already than anyone else could ever be.
I can die for him—or her—Sudha. I can kill
. When I read that, I have to stop walking, because something thick and hot and molten is welling up in me like lava.
I too, Anju
, I think.
I too
.

The next part of her letter is hard to read. It has been written and rewritten, daubed over with some kind of chalky correcting paint until the paper is lumpy. Finally, impatiently, Anju has scratched it all out and written below,
I’m really worried about something Ma wrote in her last letter. Remember that time when we went to visit one of our great-uncles in an old, crumbly house near the river? Remember the retarded boy locked up in the terrace room who scared us so much, and how Pishi explained he’d been born with a birth defect? No one had paid him much attention—they’d thought of him as some kind of freak accident. But one of our cousins just gave birth to a baby with the same problem. Ma wrote that it’s probably not hereditary, but she thought I should tell the doctor and go through any tests he suggests. I showed the letter to Sunil, and he’s already set up an appointment for next week. But Ma must have told you this already so you can get your baby checked too
.

I hold the letter scrunched tight in my fist. I am breathless, as though someone has punched all the air out of my lungs. I can feel the cold prickle of sweat between my breasts. Gouri Ma hasn’t written a word of this to me. Gouri Ma, who loves me like a daughter, who would never want harm of any kind to come upon me. There’s only one explanation for her silence: she knew—as Pishi had suspected she did—that my father was an impostor, unrelated to her husband. She knew my baby and I were at no risk, for we did not share the Chatterjee blood.

I squeeze my eyes tightly shut to keep the tears in. All this time, somewhere in that place where unreasonable hope hides, I had nursed the idea that Pishi had been wrong. She was old, and it had all happened a long time back. She could have got the facts a little mixed up, embroidered the parts she’d forgotten. Now I no longer have that comfort. And as for not being at risk, who knows what diseases ran in the veins of my father the wastrel? What murderous genes he has planted in his grandchild?

I tear Anju’s letter into tiny bits and go straight to the kitchen.
Veined with her pen strokes, the pieces gleam blue one last time on the coals before they begin to char. Don’t regret what you can’t change, I tell myself, shivering, my arms hugging my belly. But what I am really thinking is,
If only I could burn away my past like this
.