Sister of My Heart (4 page)

I trust Pishi. I know she must have a reason for her silence. And yet I am strangely pulled to that day twelve years ago, day of my father’s end, day of my beginning, when perhaps our spirits crossed in mid-air, his rising to heaven, mine descending to earth. Recently the pull has grown more urgent, for any day now we will shed our child-selves, Anju and I, and become women. And how can we take on that new history if we know nothing of what came before?

For my mother’s sake too, I want to know what happened that day—and what led to it. Perhaps it will help me understand why her heart is so bile-bitter, why she has only words of complaint
and chastisement for me. Perhaps it will help me grow more daughterly toward her.

So on Sunday morning when Anju is busy with a new American novel she has borrowed from the bookstore, I go looking for Pishi. I find her on the terrace setting out trayfuls of salted mangoes for drying. Pishi is an excellent pickle maker and knows it. Ever since she returned to her father’s house, she has told us proudly, the Chatterjees have never had to soil their lips with store-bought achar. In three days’ time, when the mango slices are crisped thin by the sun, she will mix in spiced mustard oil and chili powder and seal them in squat jars for us to enjoy through the year. Meanwhile she must stay up here to guard them from the black-faced monkeys which appear magically—for monkeys are not common here in the heart of Calcutta—every pickling season. Anju thinks they must escape from the Alipur Zoo, but Ramdin-mudi, who owns the corner grocery, insists they are descendents of the god Hanuman, whose image, with its great coiled tail, hangs in his store above the tins of atta and oil.

Pishi looks unhappy. There’s going to be a big kirtan in the neighborhood temple this afternoon, singers and dholak players who have come all the way from Nabadwip, and all the women she knows are going. Kirtans are one of the few pleasures Pishi considers suitable for widows and thus allows herself. But drying mangoes is an important job, not something she can trust to a maidservant, for everyone knows that if the slices are touched by a woman who hasn’t bathed, or has lain with a man that day, or is menstruating, they will turn furry with fungus.

I’ll be happy to watch the mangoes for her, I say. I’ll be very clean and careful and turn them over at the right time so both sides get equal sun. If she will tell me a special story, one I’ve been wanting to hear all my life.

Pishi knows at once which story it is that I desire. Her face grows dark and pinched with disapproval. Is it apprehension I see in her eyes? She orders me to go downstairs. But there’s a faint
note of unsureness in her voice, which gives me the courage to resist.

“Why won’t you tell me?” I cry. “I have a right to hear about my father. Haven’t you always told us that we’ll never really know who we are if we don’t learn about our past?”

Pishi stares past me at the blank sky. Finally she says, “At the heart of the story you want to know, a secret lies buried. I am the only person left alive who knows it, though sometimes I think your aunt Gouri might have her suspicions. But she’s an intelligent woman—she knows that there are times when one should search for answers and times when one should let matters be.

“I’ve always believed in the importance of telling you girls about your past—you know that. But this secret is so terrible that I’ve been reluctant to burden you with it. I’m afraid it will take away your childhood and destroy the love that you hold dearest. I’m afraid it will make you hate me.”

“Pishi Ma,” I cry, my voice breaking with excitement, “you
must
tell me. I need to know. And nothing could ever make me hate you.”

“I hope that’s true,” says Pishi, “because you and Anju are the daughters I was not lucky enough to give birth to. Through you the Bidhata Purush has allowed me to experience the blessing of mother love, and for that I always thank him. But it’s not myself I worry about, it’s you. And your relationship with—”

Here Pishi breaks off, and in the silence that wells up around us I notice how her voice has changed, grown dark and deep-grained as it never was before. And in dizzy fear I know this is a dangerous story, one that can burn me in its sudden blaze.

“Are you sure you really want to know this secret?”

Pishi watches me. I know that if I betray the tiniest fear she will stop, the sun will cease its white-hot circling around me, and I will have my old, safe life back again.

I hold my body tense against the temptation. “I am sure,” I say.

“Very well,” says Pishi, and her breath is ragged and resigned.
“Come, sit close to me, and I’ll tell you. It is your right after all, this story about your father. And your mother, yes, for it is her story too. And if your love survives this telling, then you’ll know it’s true, and that nothing can break it, ever.”

That is how I finally learn about my father’s life, and his death.

“Your father came to this house in the hot month of Sraban,” says Pishi, “in a parched year when the crops were beginning to fail and there were more beggars than usual in front of our gate. Even Bijoy, Anju’s father, had worry etched deep and black under his eyes because in those days much of our money came from our ancestral paddy fields. His anxiety hurt me, for more than anything in my life I wanted him to be happy, my younger brother who had taken me into his home when mine shattered and had never for a moment let me feel that I was a burden.

“With him your father brought a locked blue trunk, a long, thin music case stitched in red silk, a newlywed wife, and rain. For the very night he came, the sky filled with fat-bellied clouds the color of steel, and a cool wind began to blow, smelling of faraway wet earth and champak flowers—a smell that even now, remembering, makes my old-widow blood beat faster. And the monsoons began. Lying in bed we could hear the jhup-jhup of the raindrops on the roof, the coconut trees rustling their pleasure. The rain lasted all month, just heavy enough, with sunshine in between to keep us from getting tired. By the end of it our garden was filled with more flowers than I recall ever seeing, bel and jui and the white king-flower, gandharaj, that makes you drunk with its sweet smell, and the crops were saved.

“Perhaps that is why Bijoy took your father so fully into his heart, because he believed he was good luck. But I think he would have even otherwise. For your father was a man of great charm, and part of his charm lay in his recklessness, his belief that
every day was a new one untouched by yesterday’s deeds, and that he could get away with anything for the price of a smile.

“All this Bijoy loved because it was so completely different from the way he was, always proper, always responsible. The way he, as the only son of the Chatterjees, had been trained to be. But some of his seriousness fell away from him when he was with your father, and he laughed more boyishly, more openheartedly, than in years. For this, I too loved your father.

“Your father told us his name was Gopal, and that he was the only son of our youngest uncle. All we knew of this uncle was that he had taken his share of the family inheritance and left home a long time ago, after a fierce quarrel with our grandfather. Now Gopal told us that his father had settled in the city of Khulna, across the border, where he had thrived as a merchant until the partition. But in the riots that followed he had lost everything—the business, the house, his savings—and, brokenhearted, died soon after. His last words to Gopal had been to go back to his ancestral home and tell his people his story.

“We welcomed our lost cousin into the family with joy, honored that he had chosen to come to us. He was so handsome and fair-skinned, so obviously well born, and laughed so merrily when describing the trials of his travels to Calcutta. He would burst into song for the least reason. And he played the flute—for that was what had been in the red silken case—as sweetly as his namesake Gopal, the god Krishna, must have done when he charmed the milkmaids of Brindaban into leaving home and husband to follow him.

“There was much that he didn’t tell us about himself and about your mother. Some of it I would learn from words Nalini let fall carelessly from time to time, and some I would learn when you were born, by piecing together her delirious words as she tossed about in her bed of fever and grief and childbirth pain. That he’d met his new bride as she washed clothes by the river at one of the villages where his boat had stopped. That he promised her riches and honor, marriage into one of the oldest Calcutta
families, promised her eternal love in a voice so sweet she thought it surely would pull down the stars from the sky. It made her forget years’ worth of cautions impressed on her by mothers and aunts, the old women of the village. At dawn she slipped away from her parents’ home. She let your father take her hand and pull her onto the rickety boat filled with men like himself who hoped to make their fortune in the big city.

I want to interrupt Pishi. Surely she is wrong. How can this runaway adventuress be my mother, who is built of sighs and complaints, who guards every propriety as though it is a fragile crystal heirloom she has been personally entrusted with? My mother, who has implied often enough that the laxities of our household would never have been tolerated in her father’s perfectly run one—how could she have been washing clothes like a common village girl? And yet, as the scene shapes itself inside my eyelids, I know it is true.

In the scene, my mother is slim and scared. The hot stares of the men on the boat make her blush and draw the edge of her sari over her face. She wonders in fear as she breathes in their unwashed odors if she has made a horrible mistake, if distaste for the unending drudgery of her chores—scouring pots that blackened her nails and broke them, lighting coal fires that turned her eyes a stinging red, plastering cow dung on the walls of the hut that leaked every monsoon—has led her to ruin. She wipes at her tears silently as night falls and the sky fills with strange stars, and when my father tries to kiss her, discreetly, behind a bale of hay, she pushes him from her with sudden energy.

Fortunately, my father is not without honor. When after changing many boats and trains they finally reach Calcutta, he takes her to the Kali temple. There a priest mumbles a few mantras and impatiently gestures at them to exchange garlands. Then he tucks into his waistband the coins my father gave him and turns to the next couple, for Kalighat is popular with lovers who have eloped. And thus my parents are married.

It is not what my mother dreamed of all those years as she
swept the mud floor of her home with a coconut-leaf jhata and ground red pepper paste for curries and wiped the snot noses of her younger brothers and sisters. Where is her red Benarasi, glittering with zari thread? Where is her wedding jewelry, the gold bangles with the alligator-head design, the thick seven-strand chain that when unwound will reach from her head to her feet? Where are the hooped earrings so large they knock against her cheeks when she turns her head, the tiny diamond that sets off her perfect nose? (For my mother is pretty, she knows this, pretty enough to deserve a better life.) Where are all her childhood friends, fellow-sharers in fantasy, to look on enviously and whisper behind their hands as the conch shell sounds its auspicious notes? Still, she allows herself a tiny smile as her husband rubs vermillion into the parting of her hair, the good luck sindur that proclaims to the world that she is a married woman, with a new life ahead of her.

That new life must have seemed good to my mother as they approached the white mansion that shone in the late afternoon sun, its brick neatly painted, its marble polished, its wrought-iron gates topped regally with prancing lions. The driver honked impressively—for although they’d hired a wheeled cart to carry their baggage most of the way, when they were close to the house, her husband had hailed a taxi. It wouldn’t do to ride up to his cousin’s house as though they were penniless, he said. Indeed, if he hadn’t been set upon by robbers early in his trip, he would have hired a taxi all the way.

Did my mother believe the story about the robbers? She had no option. To doubt him would have meant doubting herself, allowing that insidious voice to start up again inside the spaces of her skull,
you shouldn’t have, you shouldn’t have
. So she chose not to hear the stridency in my father’s voice as he told the gatekeeper to announce his arrival to barababu, the master of the house.
Yes, I’m his cousin brother, that’s right, from Khulna, what’s the matter, something wrong with your ears?
And when the barababu did appear, looking a trifle puzzled, she tried not to see the strained
lines at the corners of her husband’s mouth as he smiled, and how he held himself, too careful of the creases of his dhoti, as though he had something to prove. It pained her that she could see all this about her husband already, and she no more than a day-old bride. Somehow it made the pain worse to see that the barababu, a true gentleman—you could tell it by the way he never raised his voice, never had to, in his life—believed every word her husband was saying. So she was glad when the widow, the barababu’s sister, took her by the hand and said, Come along, my dear, you must be so tired after the long journey, not to mention terrified, having those robbers attack you like that. (For that was what Gopal had said, to explain his bride’s bare arms, her unjeweled neck and ears. And my mother, lowering her startled eyes quickly, guiltfully, had realized that it was not the ceremonial knotting of garments that binds a wife to a husband but the chain of collusion.) Fortunately, the widow did not notice my mother’s blush of shame. What is the world coming to these days, she continued. It is kaliyug for sure. Come, let the men catch up on their man-talk. I’ll get you a glass of sweet michri water and show you the room where you are to sleep.