Sister of My Heart (44 page)

I can’t complain too much though, because he did get the crib. He found the ad in the flea-market paper and went and picked it up. Set it up, too, all by himself. He could have used an extra pair of hands, but he didn’t push me to help him. Not that I could have done it. I couldn’t even enter the room. Just seeing
him carry it in, part by part, made my hands start shaking. I felt like I was spiraling back into those first dizzy days after I’d returned from the hospital when I’d have to hold on to the edge of the bed because otherwise I’d surely have floated away, I was that empty inside.

Afterward, Sunil came over to where I was sitting by the window, staring out, and touched the back of my neck lightly. “I know you’re hurting, Anju. I’m hurting too. But you must pull yourself together. Dayita will be here in a few days—by your invitation, I might add.”

“I didn’t invite
her
,” I mumbled through stiff lips. I couldn’t help it, even though it made me feel meaner than hell.

Sunil gave me a look, mingled annoyance and pity. For once I could read what was going through his mind.
Sorry, sweetheart, you don’t have a choice anymore. Maybe having to deal with it would be good for you
.

I
do
have a choice, I said to myself. Dayita doesn’t exist for me. No other baby does. Sudha will understand—she’ll know I can’t be forced, not in this. Because it’s the least I owe my Prem.

Today I’m determined to empty out the remaining drawers of the desk. We don’t have an extra dresser, but Sudha can put her clothes in there, and the top will do very nicely for her knickknacks. Her mattress, which we’ll pick up this weekend, can go in the corner by the window.

I am careful to give the crib a wide berth. A murky energy throbs around it, like in the taboo places spoken of in old tales. It would suck me in if I got too close.

I pull out drawers filled with Sunil’s books and papers. Dried-out pens spill out, and college notes written in faded ink. A stapler, envelopes, manila folders, outdated textbooks which he’ll never use again but won’t let me throw away. As I move back and forth filling cartons, I keep my face carefully averted. I’m safe as long as my eyes aren’t caught by the white slats of the crib, by the jauntily swinging red-and-black Mickey Mouse mobile Sunil’s described to me.

Before long, I’ve run out of space. Maybe if I repack the boxes Sunil filled last week, I can stuff a few more items into them. I lift a stack of old bank statements out of one—what a pack rat Sunil is!—and something clatters to the floor. It’s an oval wooden container small enough to be cupped in my palm, intricately carved with leaves and fruit in a Kashmiri design. I’ve never seen it before. Wait!—I have, years ago at our wedding, when some relative presented it to us. To keep something valuable in, he’d said. Like most of our wedding gifts, it was pretty but not very practical, and I was sure we’d left it behind. How on earth did it get here, at the bottom of a box filled with yellowed Merrill Lynch annual reports?

I flick the lid open unthinkingly, expecting it to be empty, but it isn’t. A wisp of cloth flutters from it—a handkerchief, my wedding handkerchief, that delicate white lawn bordered with embroidered good-luck lotuses. I bury my face in it, trying to recall that far-off day. It seems I smell the marriage-fire, the priest’s reedy, chanting voice, the turmeric rubbed into my skin for luck. The smell of a long-dissipated dream. Did I put the handkerchief in that box? Recently my mind’s been like a sieve. But no, I remember quite clearly putting it into the top drawer of the dresser in my bedroom in Sunil’s father’s house. Sunil must have taken it from there before he came away to America. Who would have thought he was such a romantic!

I tuck the handkerchief into my bra. At dinner I’ll take it out with a flourish, tease Sunil about it. It’s been a long time since we’ve had something to laugh about.

Then a terrible doubt takes hold of me. I spread out the handkerchief and examine the initial in the corner, looped in silk thread red as danger, red as betrayal and bitter blood. Just as I’d expected in the deep, hopeless cavern of my heart, it’s a B for Basudha.

How could I have forgotten, even for a breath-beat? Is it that the mind, in order to survive, blacks out moments that would otherwise drive it mad?

The scene shivers to life before my eyes once again, as it did so many times during the bittersweet month after my wedding, those nights I lay awake after lovemaking, wondering of whom Sunil had been thinking as he groaned his pleasure between my breasts.

The wedding dinner is over. We rise. Ramesh and Sudha walk ahead, his arm under her reluctant elbow. She pulls out a handkerchief to wipe her face. She replaces it—but no, it falls behind the table. No one notices Sunil bending to pick it up. To slip it into his pocket where he fists his hand around it. No one except me
.

Now I hold the handkerchief to my trembling lips. It smells faintly, sweetly of my cousin’s body. I wait for the old jealousy to bare its fangs, but all I feel is despair. How many times had Sunil tried to stop me from bringing Sudha over to America? How many hints had he given?
Why can’t you leave well enough alone
? I’d thought he was being selfish, stingy. But he’d only been trying to save me.

There’s a roaring in my ears like opened floodgates.
You don’t have a choice anymore
, says my husband’s voice as I’m swept away. Oh, Sudha, now that you’re already halfway to America in your mind, what shall we do now?

ONCE WHEN
Anju and I were children, Gouri Ma took us to the Maidan fair. We loved everything about it, from the smell of boiling molasses at the sweets stand to the brightly colored parrots the bird vendor carried around in cages hung from poles. Best of all we liked the nagordola, the huge Ferris wheel. It would start off creakily, excruciatingly slow, so that we’d stamp our feet and cry,
Faster, faster
. But soon enough our car was hurtling around, the earth disappearing somewhere below, the sky opening around us in a rush, then earth, then sky, then earth again, until we screamed for the wheel to stop its relentless spinning. Yet when it did, we ran as quickly as we could, dizzy and stumble-footed, to stand in line for another ride.

These last few weeks I feel as if I am on that nagordola. After I said no to Ashok, how painfully time dragged its crippled body along. The desire to be gone built like steam inside my heart until I was ready to explode.
Faster, faster
, I chafed until the giant Ferris wheel of the days finally picked up speed and became a mad blur of shopping-packing-tickets-passports-inoculations. Not until this morning at the airport, when I feel the mothers’ love pulling at me like a river pulls at your body just before you climb out, do I realize the dismaying finality of this moment. My time is up, and unlike that day at the fair, I cannot pay my coin and climb on again. What I am leaving behind—I cannot articulate what it is, but I know I will not find it, ever, in America. The mothers kiss me, their lips damp and cool on my forehead, that
childhood smell of Binaca toothpaste, and I wish I had not been in such a hurry to go.

At the entrance to the security area, Singhji hands me my carry-on bag. It’s heavy with Dayita’s things, nappies and bottles of juice and extra outfits—how many items such a little person needs!—but wedged into a corner I catch a glimpse of a packet wrapped in brown paper and tied with string.

“What’s this?” I ask.

“Oh, nothing,” say the mothers, “but be careful, don’t lose it.” They wipe at their eyes with their sari edges as they whisper blessings.
Goddess Durga keep you. May you be always happy. And brave as the Rani of Jhansi
. When I reach for the packet to see what is inside, they swat my hand away with mock-frowns. “Wait until you get on the plane,” they say.

I have been overwhelmed by gifts and good wishes all week. So many from people who I thought did not care, so many from people whose love I had done little to deserve. But then, love is never about deserving, is it? Nor is hate. I learned
that
from my mother-in-law. The teatime aunties brought jars of lemon achar for me and gripe water for Dayita. Neighbors from down the street gave me filmi magazines to read on the plane and churan mix in case I felt airsick. Sunil’s mother, as sweet and timid as ever, stopped by with a hand-knitted blanket for Dayita and a message. “Tell Sunil not to send any more money,” she whispered. “They need it more than we do. His father’s sorry about what happened, but he’s too proud to ever admit it. Maybe if Sunil called—? Will you try to persuade him?” Her stricken doe-eyes held mine until I nodded uneasy agreement.

Ramur Ma and Singhji presented me with a silver dish-and-bowl set for Dayita, with her name carved into the edge.

“But it’s too expensive!” I said, appalled at the thought of how much of their savings such a gift must have eaten into.

“Oh hush,” said Ramur Ma. “Just be sure to send us photos of Daya Moni when she gets old enough to eat from them.”

Ashok tried to give me back his diamond ring. When I would not accept it, he gave me a plastic card embossed with my name.

“It’s a credit card,” he explained.

I knew about credit cards—Anju had written to me about them—but I hadn’t known one could get them in India.

“They’ve just started issuing them,” he said. “You can use it in America, and the bill will be sent to me here. I don’t want you ever to run out of money, or feel dependent on anyone.” He paused, and I wondered if he meant Sunil, and whether by the keenness sometimes given to lovers he sensed my ambivalence toward him. But he couldn’t—how could he? I had been very careful to say nothing.

“I want you to be able to give Dayita everything she needs—and most important, to be able to buy a ticket whenever you decide you’re ready to come back home.” He pressed the card into my hand. “To me,” he added.

I started to protest, but he said, “Please—just think of it as a kindness you’re doing me, because otherwise I’d be worrying about you every day.”

I took it then, but though I appreciated his concern, inside me I vowed I would never use it. Once I had depended on a man who clapped his hands over his ears and said,
Please, Sudha, let me be
. It was my own feet I wanted to stand on now.

Late last night, when the mothers had finished helping me pack my suitcases, Gouri Ma handed me a letter. From the fancy embossed envelope I could see it was a wedding card. “This came a few days ago,” she said, her voice cautious. The glitter in her eyes—I could not tell if it was pain or anger. “Didi and Nalini wanted me to destroy it right away, but I felt I did not have the right to.”

Even before I saw the Bardhaman postmark, I knew what it was. I knew it with the same kind of instinct that makes you snatch your hand away from a scorpion though no one has warned you yet of what it might do. A wedding announcement
for Ramesh. Sent by my mother-in-law. One last swipe from her poisonous claw.

Ah, how much spite that woman had pent up within her.

“My poor Sudha, are you very upset?” Pishi asked. She put out a hand to knead my stiff, high shoulders.

I was. It was not because Ramesh was getting remarried. After all, I myself had briefly considered the same thing. I suspected the marriage was more his mother’s idea, anyway. She would have gone around and around him like the grinding stones we use to crush wheat,
What about your duty to the Sanyal family, what about me, I’m too old to run this household all by myself
, until one day he covered his ears and said,
okay, okay, do what you want
. But to send me this card—I could hear her voice between the beautifully looped gold characters on it, taunting me.
See how easily you can be replaced, see what a catch my son is, see what an enormous mistake you made, leaving him
. My skin smarted from it as from a sudden slap.

I took a deep breath, let it out. I could not afford to add the weight of old resentments to all that I was carrying already with me to my new life. My mother was saying something about the gall of that woman, you’d think she’d at least have had the decency to return Sudha’s wedding jewelry, now that she’s getting a whole new dowry along with a new daughter-in-law, it’ll serve her right if Ramesh’s second wife turns out to be a shrew. I lifted my arm wearily to stop her.

“Let it be,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.” I did not really feel that way, not yet. But saying the words brought me a moment of ease, as though after having spent hours climbing up a dark, stale stairwell, I had felt on my face a riffle of night air. It gave me hope that with time I would grow into their truth.