The Vine of Desire (14 page)

Perhaps it is not strength that keeps her from opening the letter. Maybe Ashok’s letter is a painful reminder of the prospects she gave up in order to come here, into this disappointing, disturbing existence. Or is she saving it, a deferred treat, the way children hide candy in their pockets to enjoy in the sticky secrecy of their room?

The chicken simmers in the pot, filling the room with the centuries-old smell of garam masala. Sudha zips her wind-breaker, smooths down her hair, the folds of her sari. In the mirror, her reflection looks dissatisfied.

“I wish I had a pair of jeans,” she tells Dayita, who is trying to climb into her stroller. “I think I’ll scream if one more stranger comes up and tells me how much they love my costume. Maybe I should borrow a few things from Anju.” But her voice is reluctant. “No, don’t climb in yet,” she adds sharply. “Wait till we get downstairs. NO, Dayita! Don’t you hear me?”

She turns off the chicken, checks the catches on the windows. Last week, someone broke into the apartment downstairs and trashed it. The police think it’s the tenant’s ex-boyfriend, but Sunil grumbles that the neighborhood’s going to the dogs. She grabs a protesting Dayita in one hand, the stroller in the other. At the door she stops and comes back to pick up the letter.

In the park Sudha pauses the way she does each day now and looks around. Expectation flickers over her face like a match-stick
flame. She’s looking for Sara of the cutoff jeans, Sara the adventurous, who has promised her entry into the real American life, and—more importantly—escape from herself. But it’s as though the woman has disappeared, as though she had only been a figment of Sudha’s wanting. She bites her lip and sets Dayita down near the slides. Dayita holds up a fistful of sand to show Sudha.

“Mama! Mama!”

“Yes, shona, I’m watching,” says Sudha. “That’s very good, shona. Just don’t get any into your eyes.” She nods encouragingly, but she’s thinking about another place, another life. The past tugs at her with its blue aerogram fingers.

Sudha takes the letter out of her pocket and turns it over and over.

When she’d been in America for two weeks, Anju finally asked her the question she’d been expecting ever since she got here.
Why did you turn Ashok down?

Sudha shrugged. She’d imagined the question many times, practiced the shrug, the careful answer.

“Tell me!”

“What’s the point of going over what’s done with, finished? We need to put the past behind us, both you and I.”

Anju shook her head. “I can’t put it behind me until I know. I keep thinking you did it because of me, because you’d promised to come and be with me. It makes me feel terrible, like I ruined your life all over again. Like you sacrificed yourself for me.”

“I’ve given up sacrificing myself for others. It leaves you with the worst hangover.”

“Quit joking.”

“I turned him down because I didn’t want him to have to
take care of me,” Sudha said. “I wanted to be independent. And it seemed like America was the best place for that.”

“But don’t you love him?”

Sudha ignored the question. “So, as you see, it was a wholly selfish decision.”

“I don’t believe you,” Anju said. “At least not that last part, about you being selfish.”

“Dear Anju, everyone is selfish in the end!”

Anju had laughed, but uneasily. There was a new hardness in her cousin’s eyes. An opaqueness, as though she wasn’t telling Anju the whole truth. In order to survive, Sudha had had to learn many things. Could selfishness be one of them?

Staring at Ashok’s letter, Sudha thinks,
This man I loved.
But love is a code sketched in dust. You look away, the wind blows, the pattern shifts, and when you look again, you discover it says something else. She inserts a finger under the flap and pulls until the aerogram tears jaggedly along the crease.

Dearest Sudha
,

For months now I have been waiting impatiently for a letter from you. At first I told myself that it was because you were settling into an unfamiliar environment. There were many pressures on you, many calls on your time. You were meeting Anju after so long, you had a lot of catching up to do, a lot of help to give. It was enough to consume anyone’s attention.

But now it has been three months, and I’m beginning to worry. Sudha, why this silence? All the things I said to you, sitting by the Ganges, have you forgotten them? Is America enticing you away with its glitter? And most of all—I am afraid to ask this—is there someone else?

For me there isn’t. There never will be. In spite of the obstacles that
chance placed in our path these many years, I’m convinced that we’re meant to be together. Who else knows you the way I do, Sudha? Who else knows how it felt to go through a decade of hopeless longing while you were married to someone else? Surely that means something to you, even in America?

Write soon. Or better, come back soon, so you and I and your little girl can finally be a family.

Love
,
        
Ashok

Dayita is tired of sand. Her eyes fall on the slide, where the older children are playing. She crawls toward it, then tries to stand. She’s on her feet, swaying precariously on the uneven sand. She takes a step, then another. She’s walking—it’s her first time—her face alight with the adventure of moving beyond her babyhood. Then she loses her balance and sits down with a bump.

Lost in Ashok’s words, Sudha sees none of this.

Dayita will walk again soon—perhaps even this evening. They will see her then and make much of her. Still, this special moment in her life has come and gone, with no one to notice.

Small tragedies, the hairline cracks in our relationships.

She is up again already, trying to climb the iron rungs of the ladder that leads to the top of a slide that is surely far too high for her. She clings to the first rung, advances to the second. She’s on the third rung, pulling herself up by the sheer force of her stubbornness. Farther, farther, until she crawls onto the little ledge on top. Then she looks down the length of the slide and lets out a scream. She screams methodically and piercingly—she doesn’t waste energy in crying—until Sudha is startled out of her reverie.

“Oh, my God! How did you get up there!” she cries, rushing
to the slide. “Come down, baby. Come, Mummy will catch you.” But Dayita continues her clockwork screams. A little crowd has gathered around them by now—other children want to use the slide, and their parents give Sudha eloquently accusing glances—until finally she throws off her windbreaker, tucks up her sari, climbs the ladder, puts Dayita in her lap, and slides down with her.

Let us remember her like this, no matter what happens later: a slim woman, radiant with laughter and speed, the knot of her hair loosened so that she appears younger than she is. This is the woman she would have been if the world had dealt with her more kindly. The wind sends the edge of her sari flying like a victory banner. The child in her lap claps in delight, and the woman presses her cheek to the child’s head. Her burnished curls are an innocent halo around her face. Untouched by worry or need, for a moment she belongs to the world of myth. She is the beautiful princess who lived in the palace of snakes.

It is a tale from the time before birth and death, when Anju sat beneath the brittle, hopeful red of a maple tree, her hands clasped over the mound of her stomach.

“Once there was a princess,” Anju said to Prem. “She lived in a beautiful palace beneath a lake—a palace made of snakes. Snake pillars, snake floors, a quilt of snakes who sang her to sleep every night. As long as she never left the palace, she was told, she would be happy.

“So of course,” said Anju, “one day the princess left the palace and began to make her way upward. A stairway of pearl appeared, reaching all the way to the world of men, a world she thought beautiful. As you might expect, there was, on the shore,
a young man. He held out his hand to pull her out of the water, and she took it. When he kissed her, she heard a sound like thunder, and turned to see that the stairway was gone.

“The princess did not worry too much about this. She was in love. She followed the young man to his house, but his mother called her a witch and would not let her stay. The young man built the princess a cottage in the forest. They lived there happily enough, though the young man would go from time to time to visit his mother. The years passed. The princess gave birth to a baby girl. The man’s visits to his mother grew longer and longer, and one day he did not return at all. When the princess went to the village to search for him, she came upon a wedding: her lover was getting married to a rich girl his mother had picked out for him.

“The princess did not confront her lover—what was the point? She took her daughter and started out for the serpent lake. She hoped the stairway would be there this time, in her need. But there was nothing. Or perhaps this was a different lake—she couldn’t quite tell. Thus began her journey from lake to lake, with her daughter. Everywhere she went, men were fascinated by her and could not keep away. Some loved her, some used her badly, and some abandoned their homes to follow her. None lasted. They tired of her, or feared her. Or perhaps it was she who shrugged them off to continue on her way. But she never found the pearl stairway to the palace under the water.

“If you look up just before dawn,” said Anju, “when only a couple of stars are left in the sky, you can see her pass with her daughter, still searching. The fog is the tattered end of her sari. The stars are her eyes that have learned it is of no use to weep.”

There are many versions to every story. The version you choose reveals more about the storyteller than about the story.
What then did this story about the abandoned princess-turned-homebreaker say about Anju? What did it say about her feelings for her cousin—feelings she could touch only when they were wrapped in fiction’s insulations?

On the way back to the apartment, Sudha stops at an overpass. Below her, cars whizz by, shimmery metallic slashes against the slateboard of the freeway. She takes the letter from her pocket and tears it into tiny pieces. She slips her hand through the wire netting put up by the city to keep people safe—as though safety could be so easily achieved—and lets the pieces fall. “The past is the past,” she whispers. But perhaps we mishear, perhaps it is something quite different that she says,
everlasting
, or
hold fast.
It is the year of incomprehensible losses, of unbelievable gains. The death toll in Rwanda has crossed the half-million mark. After twenty-seven years in jail, Mandela has become South Africa’s first black president. Is this the law of the world, that to go forward you must first step back? Her voice is drowned in the dizzying roar of SUVs and Harleys, BMWs and Benzes, as they vie with each other for mastery of the road. The torn bits of paper float for a moment, silver in the evening air. Fragments of phrases (but surely they weren’t in the letter):
mine, happiness, why.
Then they are gone.