The Vine of Desire (24 page)

What, by the way, does the last paragraph mean? It’s very ambiguous.

I liked the beginning of the essay, but as the paper went along it became somewhat overwrought and abstract. I’ve noticed this shortcoming in other papers of yours as well.

I’m not sure how you will work this into a full-length memoir piece. Maybe you should just start over with a subject you feel less emotional about.

William Lindley

Fifteen
S
udha

Anju is restless tonight. Her sleep is a cave filled with murky water, lit by the phosphorescent fins of alien fauna. She swims around it in circles, she dips her face in the water and lets the seaweed caress her features. She raises her face to snatch a breath of uncertain, brackish air. Sometimes she opens her eyes onto her bedroom and sees nothing. Sometimes she shuts them quickly as though she would rather not see what is there.

Eleven
P.M.
Midnight. One
A.M.
She leaves the bed and goes to the living room. She removes from her backpack the notebook with the letters to her father. The light from the lamp falls on them damply, as though the room were filled with fog, or tears. Anju reads with concentration, moving her lips silently. She loves the faithfulness of words. How, once you’ve held them in your mouth, they become yours.

She knows this also: there may come a time when theirs will be the only loyalty she can count on.

Dear Father
,

Some nights, lying down to sleep, I feel I am losing my body. Where are my feet, my hands, my face? Dark erases the line of my cheek and draws in another’s. Where is the shape of my life? My knees float away into the blackness of the bedroom. The hairs on my head rise into the sky in separate strands. You must not think this frightens me. I am exhilarated by the regrouping of my cells. They tell me I can be someone else—anyone I want. If only I could decide who.

Dear Father
,

Today when I walked out of the classroom a sudden gust of wind tossed the smell of wild ginger at me—though of course there is no wild ginger growing anywhere on campus. Suddenly I understood why you left us. The allure of newness. It tugs at me like time tugs at the snake’s skin, persuading him to shrug it off. But what if, shrugging off my old life, I find I am not a snake but an onion instead? Peel after peel after peel, and then: nothing.

Father
,

Sometimes, reading a new book, I grow so excited I forget to breathe. There’s so much to learn, and already I’ve lost so much time. Each day new worlds glimmer around me. I am like a nearsighted person wearing her first glasses. Apartheid. Midnight’s Children. The Internet. Aung San Suu Kyi. Then I think, what good is all this information? What will it change in my life? In my husband’s face?

Here is a fact: I am of no use to my household. If I disappeared tomorrow, Sudha would grieve, Dayita would look for me behind curtains and doors, wondering if this were some long game of hide-and-seek. Sunil would call the police. But soon they would draw together, the way flesh pulls itself close to heal a wound. Not even a scar would remain.

There is a sound at the bedroom door. Anju does not startle. She does not whisk the notebook out of sight. Does she want, then, to be discovered? Does she want Sunil to see the questions she has written for her father? Does she wish him to answer them?

“Anju! What are you doing!” says Sunil in a drowsy voice. Anju opens her mouth to speak, then realizes that he doesn’t want a reply. Already he’s turning away. “Come to bed,” he says. “You’ll be dead tired tomorrow.”

Anju puts away her books. In bed, slipping into the flooded cave of sleep, she begins to make a list. It is a list of things to take with her when she disappears.

Sudha, too, has been writing. The letter sits on her bedside table now, an oblong of ghostly white in the darkened room.

Ashok
,

I apologize for not answering your letters. Writing takes a lot of strength, and I didn’t—don’t—have any to spare.

When I came away from India, I told you not to wait for me. I’m saying it again. I don’t know when I’ll return, if at all. I’m discovering that my divorce was like a surgeon’s scalpel. It cut the past out of my flesh, the good with the bad. Now I must find other things to live for.

I left you twice—the first time to marry, the second time to come to America. I don’t want there to be a third time.

It’s best this way. Remember the old tales about the Vish Kanyas? Women bred on poison, whose kisses brought destruction wherever they went? I think I’m one of them.

When I seal this envelope, I’m going to forget you.

You must do the same. Believe me, you’ll be happier for it.

“Don’t tell me this is what you’re going to wear!” Anju’s voice rises in disbelief.

“I won’t tell you, then,” Sudha smiles. She’s dressed in one of Anju’s old jeans and a plain white T-shirt. Her hair is tied back in a no-nonsense ponytail. Her scrubbed, girl-next-door face is beautiful in a whole new way, accentuating the smoky allure of her eyes.

Anju doesn’t think so. “You look like the ugly duckling,” she snaps.

“We’ll have to see if my frog prince recognizes me, then.”

Anju refuses to be amused. “You’ve got your fairy tales mixed up. At least put on some makeup. A pair of earrings.”

Sudha shakes her head. “I don’t want—” she starts, then breaks off as Sunil enters the room. The scowl on his face gives way to a more pleasant look as he stares at the plainness of her getup. “How about I make breakfast today?” he says after a moment.

“Are my ears working right?” Anju asks. “Did I hear the man say he’ll cook for us?”

“Anju!” Sudha says.

“It’s just that I never knew he could,” Anju says.

“She always did have a conveniently short memory.”

“Stop it, you two!” Sudha says, laughing. She helps Sunil find flour and eggs, a nonstick pan. He turns out surprisingly good Indian pancakes, crisp and golden, studded with onions and green chilies and mustard seed, to be eaten with ginger pickle. For Dayita he mixes molasses into the batter and makes small sweet ones shaped like jellyfish. When she clears her plate and
clamors for more, he smiles. It’s the kind of smile only Dayita can pull out of him, delighted and boyish.

When Lalit rings the doorbell, Sunil swings the door open in a magnanimous arc and invites him to join them. If Lalit is taken aback by this sudden friendliness, his expression doesn’t give it away. It must be part of the training they give them in med school.

Hellos all around the table. A cheery one from Lalit, a subdued one from Sudha, an exuberant one from Anju, accompanied by loud fork-banging from an excited Dayita. Lalit pulls up a chair close to Sudha.

“How’s it going?” The way he cocks his head, like an intelligent bird, and waits for her answer transforms the question into something deeper. Anju clears her throat teasingly. Sudha blushes and mumbles a brief reply. At the stove Sunil’s grin has turned Machiavellian. He sprinkles extra chilies onto the pancake he’s making for Lalit.

“Looks great!” Lalit says, and takes an enthusiastic bite.

“Hope it isn’t too spicy for you,” Sunil says sweetly.

“No, no, it’s fine,” Lalit says. He dabs surreptitiously at his forehead, where sweat has broken out.

“Here, have some orange juice,” Anju says.

“Personally, I like mine spicier,” Sunil says.

Anju, who knows he has a weak stomach, gives him a look. “You don’t have to eat all those chilies, Lalit. Just pick them out. Sudha, get him another glass of juice.”

Lalit, who is coughing, gives her a grateful glance. But soon he’s recovered enough to tell them a newlyweds joke. “So the wife’s serving him his first meal. She says, This is one of the two things I cook really well, dear: chicken curry and rice pudding.
And he replies, It’s lovely, darling. Which one is it, by the way?”

Sunil interrupts the laughter. “Since you like jokes so much, here’s one. Did you hear about the doctor whose fiancée jilted him? Not only did he take back the diamond ring he gave her, he charged her for twenty-four house calls.”

There’s a moment of utter silence. Then Lalit chuckles. He’s amused, and not just at the joke. “I’ll have to remember that one,” he says and drains his glass of juice.

They’re all laughing now. A sliver of sunshine falls across the dining table. Sunil holds Dayita aloft like a sign. “Say,
Have a nice day, Mother,” he
instructs. “Say,
Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“Bring her back before dark,” Anju says. “She turns into a pumpkin when the sun goes down.”

Everyone laughs again. They are one happy family.

They’re eating in the gardens of the Palace of Fine Arts, festive red-and-white cartons of Chinese takeout surrounding them. Sudha confesses it’s her first time with chopsticks.

“It’s simple,” says Lalit. “Just watch me.”

He picks up a peanut from the kung pao chicken with a grand flourish of his sticks, and loses it just before it reaches his mouth.

Sudha bursts out laughing, dropping her own precariously held piece of chicken in the process. “Stop! I think I just sprained my laugh muscles!”

“Madam, you must not be exercising them regularly,” Lalit says with severity. “As your doctor, I prescribe the following: ten giggles, twenty snickers, and thirty chuckles daily.”

“Please! No more! You’ll be the death of me! Haven’t you heard what they say about too much laughter?”

“Wow, another arcane Indian maxim! Wait, let me get out my notebook. …”