The Vine of Desire (43 page)

That’s the kind of thing Anju would have said. She liked talking in images. I’d laugh at them, call them fanciful. Now, having cut myself from her, I find myself taking on her ways.

Last night I woke up at 2:00
A.M.
, couldn’t sleep again. Turned on the TV, the middle of a movie, a man and a woman
walking back in the night. I knew right away they were not husband and wife. In the same way that I knew she was married to someone else. She was taking him to her house. There were chimes, silvery sounds in the black night. Then he was outside the house, she was inside. She locked the door. He picked up a porch chair, smashed the picture window with it. Oh, the shower of glass, falling in toward her like a waterfall, like it would never end! The look in her eyes, shocked, as though she hadn’t led him to this. And then pleased, because she knew she had. His face burned with wanting. I’d seen that look before, in a mirror. I turned off the movie. I knew already how it would end.

I think of my father in images. A clenched fist. (But that’s not accurate. He never hit me. He had other methods.) A bulge-eyed cartoon character, yelling rage. His ears give off wavy lines of heat. (But he rarely yelled. He didn’t need to.) A diseased root, black and misshapen, its insides eaten away with hate. (Yes.)

What did I do—and my mother—to arouse so much hatred?

Maybe I should go to Calcutta before he dies, kid, just to make him tell me.

I left the lights off in the hotel room. Still, I could see it on my palm. My pill. White like the September moon. It glowed all the way down my throat. It shone like a pearl inside my stomach. The shining took over the rest of my body. I could feel the inside of my skin, how silky it was. Pink silk, coming undone. I fell on the floor, I felt each strand of the carpet under my cheek. Tiny tentacles. Through the parted curtain I could see a star. There were rays around it, as in children’s pictures. Blue rays.
The rays came all the way into the room and touched my forehead. Icy. Icy. I thought my head would burst with exquisite pain. Then I was crying. I remembered the man telling me, better not do it alone. But alone is all I have. Kid, are you ashamed of my weakness? Each hair on my arm stood up, singing an anthem. The star beam was like a lance all the way from the sky to the center of the earth. Its point pierced me, there was no pain. For a moment, for a lifetime, I was a bead on a necklace, connected to all the other beads. I stretched my hand across three states and touched you, Dayita, you shivered in your sleep. She was lying on the other side of you, in a room made of glass. Her nightdress had slipped off her shoulder. There was a red mole on her collarbone. She smiled at my touch. Write my number down, I said. Here’s my address. Here’s my e-mail. My cell phone. The words were like underwater explosions. I thought the shaking would never stop.

Earlier today I got the letters that said he was dead. Dead. The word held a tidal wave in it. I held out my arm. In it, a million cells were dying every moment. I hated him, I did not hate him. We are all dead, only we don’t know it yet. The string broke, all the beads scattered among the ashes. Call me, Sudha, do you hear me, at least send a letter. I gave up everything for you. You can’t abandon me like this. The starlight withdrew itself. The pill was a cold sickness in my stomach. I crawled on all fours to the bed. I took off my clothes, I took off my legs, my right arm. I took off my head. It was hard to do, with only one arm. I gently loosened the eyes from their sockets. Pain is corkscrewing its way through me. Kid, I’m waiting for your letter, saying your mother was wrong, she was scared, she felt guilty for no reason, now she’s reconsidered. For the next two days, I’ll have blinding headaches. I’ll throw up in the office
bathroom. My coworkers will watch me out of the corners of their eyes. The bedsheet has wrapped itself around me thread by white thread, like the dhoti they must have put on him before taking him to the crematorium. If I have no forgiveness in me, can I ask to be forgiven? Dayita, are you there, can you hear me? Dayita, I’m waiting.

Eleven

S
udha

The afternoon is full of sleep and rain. Sleep like rain throughout the house, falling, and we falling into it, the old man curled on his bed like a wisp of hair, the mother and daughter lying against each other like pieces of a puzzle that don’t quite fit. The rain carries flutes, mildew, the entreaties of dreams. In the dream, a male voice elongates our names with anguish, which is sometimes called love—Dayitaaa, Sudhaaa—until they sound alike. It offers us sembak jasmines, the beach at Galveston, the NASA Space Center. It offers phone numbers and a future ready for plucking like a ripe pomegranate. The old man dreams of a place named after rain, hills colored like the backs of elephants, the Tista River bounded by the years of his childhood.

In my dream, a woman is packing up an apartment and a life. She reaches into a closet, into the folds of suits belonging to a husband that no longer was. She takes a black-and-white photo, a child not yet born. She slips it into her bra. The husband that no longer was opens his arms to me:
Come, come.
I peel the pomegranate,
my hands are stained with juice the color of blood. In my dream I strike out, the tape recorder falls to the ground with a sharp crack, the voice goes on calling.
Sudha, Sudhaaa.

In my dream, I’m asking the old man riddles another man told me.
Why is a woman’s mind cleaner than a man’s? Why are politicians like soiled diapers? What’s the difference between a soldier and a lady?
Even when I give him the answers, he doesn’t smile.
Smile, damn you.
He looks at me without reproach. His eyes are full of the place named after rain.

In my dream, I tell my daughter the story of Sita’s trial by fire.

After Ram had rescued her from the demon Ravan, he claimed he could not take her back because she may have slept with him.

But I didn’t, Sita said.

Where’s the proof? he asked.

Light me a fire then, she said. I don’t want to live anymore.

He obliged. She stepped into the flames. But she didn’t burn. The god of fire himself brought her back and vouched for her innocence. Ram and Sita were happily reunited.

(But, having been doubted that way, can a woman be happy again?)

In my dream, a different man this time. (This is the shape of my life, man after man, none of them right for me. Or is it I that am not right for them?) He holds out his passport to be stamped by an official in the San Francisco airport. He is taking a taxi in a country he’s never visited, to an apartment he’s never seen. He stares out of the window at the freeway dark with rain and oil slicks.

Sudha, Sudhaaa.
In her dream, my daughter butts her head against my breasts in startled protest. When she wakes up, she
will search for his voice in every room, the walker rolling over the polished wood floors like distant thunder.

I am in a vast chamber filled with incense smoke and the faces of the dead. Is it a courtroom? Is it judgment day? Am I dead, then? I see my father, I see an unborn boy. Nicole. Mangala. Sara (is she dead, too?). Their faces are dim with sadness and smoke.
Tell me
, I say,
what should I have done?

The woman has finished packing and weeping. The taxi has reached the apartment where no one lives anymore. The unborn boy holds up his palms, white as paper on which nothing has been written. On the tape, the man’s voice speaks of age and cruelty, death and home. Is death our only home? The woman walks out of the apartment, the man steps out of the taxi. They meet on the threshold, which is neither inside a house nor outside of it. The old man mumbles in his sleep,
Banglar mukh ami dekhiachi tai ami … I have seen the face of Bengal, so I no longer …
What comes after that? I can’t remember. Once by a brown river a man spoke this same poem to a woman who was (but is no longer) me.

Tell me
, I ask the dead,
what should I do?

The dead do not give advice. They watch with sorrow as we repeat our mistakes, the same mistakes, across the world and time. I look into my father’s face to see if it is still scarred or magically healed. But words like
scarred
and
healed
belong only to the living. The man from India sits on the doorstep of the apartment, listening. The woman whose husband has left her sits next to him. She is saying things to him she hasn’t been able to tell anyone. Is this because he has appeared out of her childhood and mine, that time when she could say anything she wanted? He puts an arm around her.

Tell me something.

The dead do not speak. Or maybe they are speaking, but I lack the ability to hear. The rain, which had gone away, returns now with a sound like conches. The old man recites,
I wake in the dark to see, sitting under a large umbrella leaf, the doyel, bird of dawn.
The voice on the tape says,
I will not let you go unless.
I am standing in a vast chamber walled with incense smoke. The floor is clear as diamonds. The unborn boy is pointing downward with his unlined palm, the gesture of deities in temples. Once a man spoke to me of love in a temple smelling of crushed marigolds and incense. I was young, then. I look down through the diamond floor on hills the color of elephants’ backs in the rain. The man and the woman sit on the doorstep, emptied of words. They lean a little into each other. They’ve come to a decision of sorts, though I don’t know what that might be.

I’ve come to a decision, too. But this act I am to undertake, is it penance or gift or victory over the illegitimate needs of the body? By what name shall I call it?

In my dream, I say to the old man, I will give you what you want most in the world, but you must do as I say.

In my dream, his smile is chipped and yellow, delicate as an heirloom, as the moon.

Twelve

She sees him as she walks out of the classroom, her head so full of people in books that at first she doesn’t recognize him. Lately, people in books seem more real to her than people in her life, and certainly more dependable. Open to page twenty-five and you’ll find the old man and old woman, carrying bowls of rice and soup and a leafy branch of peaches, every time. Every time they’ll invite the stranger girl to eat with them. Even when the characters have no names, you know them by their gestures, their tics as familiar as that of elderly relatives. In fact she’s beginning to think of names as graceless conveniences, like tags on baggage, is considering ways of shedding hers. So when the young man detaches himself from the wall he’s been leaning against and comes forward with easy footsteps and an outstretched hand,
Anju
, it takes her a moment to respond.

“Anju?” he says again, his brows drawn into questioning arcs, good-looking in such a guileless way that she finds herself smiling back, assuring him.

“Yes, I’m Anju.”

And it comes back to her in a flush of memory, that party night, mirrors and strobe lights and sexy, smoky laughter, the house lit like a pink cake, all of them drunk on music and what-might-happen (how young they were then, how young and unknowing).
Tonight I’m gonna dance with someone else.