Oleander Girl

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  “ ‘We’ll grow old in an empty house while she is brought up in another country without culture or values,’ he said. ‘Do you want that?’

  “I shook my head.

  “ ‘Then swear on the goddess that you’ll never contact him—or tell her about him.’

  “I felt only a moment’s compunction. I had no love for the stranger who had snatched our daughter from us. And I agreed with your grandfather: it would be the best thing for you.

  “Later, as you grew and began asking about your mother and father, I would have my doubts, but I couldn’t say anything, not until I became the only keeper of your secret.”

  The two women sit in silence, musing over the words that reverberate around them, words that have been waiting all these years to be born. What emotions are going through Korobi? Sarojini wonders. She tries to look into her granddaughter’s face, but Korobi keeps it carefully turned away.

  “Tell me about my father now.”

  Sarojini shakes her head helplessly. “I’ve told you everything I know. That’s why I was going through your grandfather’s things. I thought there might have been a letter or photographs. Maybe a copy of a marriage certificate. But if there was, he destroyed it long ago.”

  “But didn’t my father come to India, looking for my mother? For me? They were in love!”

  “No. Your grandfather sent him a telegram saying you were both dead.”

  “He told my father what?” Korobi’s voice is furious.

  Sarojini looks shamefaced, as though she herself had initiated the falsehood. “He told him not to come, that we were barely able to cope with the tragedy and to talk to him would only increase our distress. As an extra precaution, as soon as the hospital released you, he sent you and me to our village home along with Cook and Bahadur and moved into a hotel himself, closing up the house. The story he gave out to his friends and even to our servants was that your father—a certain Bhowmik, a brilliant young law student in America—had died tragically in a car crash some months back. A pregnant Anu had come home to be comforted by us. Brokenhearted, she had shut herself up in the house, refusing to meet anyone, begging us not to inform anyone of what had happened. She couldn’t even bear to mention her husband’s name. And then, just as she was feeling better, fate had struck her down, too.

  “For the first year of your life, you and I lived in the village, in our ancestral home, which was falling to pieces. When it rained, Cook had to place buckets under the leaks. We never left the house. Bahadur spread the rumor that I was recovering from tuberculosis. That kept the curious away. Once a month your grandfather came to see us. He spent most of his visits holding you, just looking at you. The pent-up love he had for Anu, I think he transferred it all to you during those days.”

  Korobi looks away. Sarojini knows that this is what hurts her granddaughter the most. Not just the deception, but that it came from the man she’d trusted more than anyone else in her life.

  “I don’t expect you to forgive us for deceiving you. All I can say is that we did it out of love—and fear. And once we had woven the story, we, too, were caught in it. We didn’t know how to cut ourselves loose.”

  The day is gone. Sarojini peers through the gloom of evening at Korobi, hoping for a sign of pardon. But her face is dark and hard, closed up tight like a walnut. Silence stretches between them, punctuated only by the call of birds returning to their nests. Sarojini thinks this silence will go on forever, until she crumbles into dust. She would welcome that: to disintegrate, to blow away in the wind, to never have to answer the look in her granddaughter’s eye.

  Downstairs, the phone rings.

  Neither Sarojini nor Korobi moves. Finally, Cook hurries from the kitchen, grumbling loudly, and picks it up.

  “It’s Rajat-babu,” she yells up. “Calling to talk to baby. What shall I say?”

  Sarojini puts her hand on her granddaughter’s arm. “Don’t talk to him right now. Don’t say anything until you’ve calmed down. Maybe it’s best not to tell him any of this. It’ll do no good. And it might lead to a host of problems.”

  The stiff angle of Korobi’s neck. Anger, sorrow, disappointment, distaste—Sarojini can’t count all the things it conveys.

  “You want me to hide such a big thing from the man I’m about to marry? You want me to perpetuate the lie you and Grandfather concocted? You want me, too, to deny my father?”

  Korobi rushes from the room as though she can’t bear to be near Sarojini. Almost as though she wants to tumble down those same stairs to join her mother, Sarojini thinks, holding her breath until she hears her granddaughter pick up the phone and say hello.

  By the river in the yellow light of the deserted streetlamp, Rajat holds his sobbing fiancée and tries to comfort her. But he can’t find the right words—he’s too shocked by the astounding news she’s just told him. He starts to say that he can imagine what she must be going through, being lied to like this, but then he stutters to a stop. The truth is, he can’t imagine it at all. It chagrins him, this failure of empathy. Perhaps it’s because the news ambushed him so unexpectedly. He’d called the Roy home to tell Korobi that he wouldn’t be able to see her tonight. He needed to spend some time with his family, whom he’d been neglecting shamefully since Bimal Roy’s death. Even at the height of his infatuation with Sonia he had managed to carve out more time for them. His mother hadn’t complained—that was not her way. But last night he got home to find Pia lying on the sofa, where she had fallen asleep waiting for him to return. Awakened, she had rubbed at her eyes plaintively and said she never got to see him these days. Struck by compunction, he promised her that he would have dinner at home tonight, maybe even play a game of Scrabble afterward. He was surprised by how happy it made him to plan a relaxed evening with his family. But when he’d talked to Korobi, the feverish intensity of her voice had worried him. He had come—as she requested—as soon as he could.

  “I’m very sorry. . . .”

  Even to his ears, the words sound inadequate, equivocal. What exactly is he sorry for? Sorry that her grandfather had betrayed her, that he might have contributed to her mother’s death? That she’d been lied to about her father for all these years? Yes, of course. But isn’t he also sorry that she has now found out about her father? Certainly it would have been simpler had Rajat not been handed this strange, sudden father-in-law, a foreigner shrouded in a conspiracy of silence. He can’t help wondering what reason Bimal Roy, a canny man if ever there was one, might have had for cutting Rob out of Korobi’s life so completely.

  “It’s hard for me to believe that Grandfather was so harsh to my mother. If only he’d accepted my father—or at least not pressured her to remain in India—she would still be alive. And I’d have grown up with both my parents.”

  Rajat makes a sympathetic sound. If only is a dangerous path to travel. But it’s no use trying to tell Korobi that right now.

  “What hurts even more is knowing that my grandparents—whom I loved more than anybody—would deceive me like this! It hurts so much.”

  Something twists inside Rajat. He thinks, unwillingly, of Sonia. How well he knows, from his own life, what Korobi is describing, that feeling as though the solid earth has turned to shifting sands beneath his feet.

  “Plus I feel stupid for being so gullible.”

  He takes a deep breath. His job right now is to comfort Korobi. She is his heart, his breath, the way out of his own abyss. “You can’t blame yourself for believing them. You had no reason to think it could be a lie. I would have done the same.”

  “Well, I’ve learned my lesson. I’m never going to trust anyone so blindly.”

  The weary bitterness in her voice troubles him. “Cara, surely you can trust me.”

  She raises a mutinous chin, her body hard, her eyes narrow and so angry he hardly recognizes them. It strikes him that he doesn’t know her as well as he’d thought. But then she gives a giant sigh and crumples against him.

  “You’re right. You’re the on
ly one I can count on. That’s why I had to tell you. Grandma said I shouldn’t, that it might change things between us. But I had to. I can’t lie like that to the man I love.”

  That word love, it comforts him. “You did the best thing.”

  “Was Grandma right? Do you feel differently about me because of what I just told you?”

  “Of course not.” But a part of Rajat is troubled. One of the things that had always charmed him about Korobi was her background. Old Bengal through and through, her great-grandfather the judge, her grandfather the barrister, her father the brilliant law student cut down tragically in his prime—khandaani, something with heft, something you could never buy your way into. As different from Sonia as handloomed silk from glittery synthetics. Marriage to Korobi, he had hoped, would initiate him into the mysteries of this life.

  Now she isn’t quite the person he had believed her to be.

  Can she read his thoughts? Because just then she says, “I’m so confused. All the things I was so proud of, my family, my heritage—they’re only half-true. The other half of me—I don’t know anything about it. Except that all this time my father was alive, and in America.”

  In the light of the streetlamp Rajat examines his fiancée’s distressed expression, the slight tremble of her lips, the hair escaped from its braid to curl untidily around her face. For a heart-stopping moment, he feels nothing. Then, thankfully, love comes rushing back like the ocean after low tide. It’s in her eyes, the real reason he loves her, and nothing can take it away: her forthrightness, her unspoiled enthusiasm—and now, courage and honesty in the face of the unexpected. At the moment, those eyes are swollen from crying and clouded with distrust. He vows that he’ll bring the shine back to them. He, Rajat, will be 100 percent dependable. He feels again that overwhelming desire to protect that he has never experienced with any other girlfriend. He kisses her with great relief.

  “You’re still my Cara, and I adore you. What you learned today doesn’t make the slightest difference to me. Don’t think about it anymore. We’ll get married in a couple of months, just as we had planned. With time, what you heard will fade away—”

  She shakes her head impatiently as though she didn’t even hear his declaration of love. “Rajat, you don’t understand! I don’t want it to fade away. I’m shocked and hurt, yes, but I’m excited, too. Do you see? I have a father now! I can meet the man my mother loved so much! All my life I longed to understand my parents. Now fate has given me a chance.”

  Rajat doesn’t like the sound of this, but before he can respond, a car door slams, startling him. A trio of men has stepped out of an Ambassador, carrying bottles of beer. They see Rajat and Korobi, and one of them says something. The others snicker. The group begins to walk toward them.

  “Cara, we have to leave.”

  “I need to find him, talk to him. I need to know who he is. And he can finally tell me about my mother—the things that no one else knows. My mother in love. Won’t that be wonderful, Rajat? Then I’ll know who I really am, too. But how will I find him? I don’t even have his name. And America is such a big country.”

  He hears the words, but they are too much to process right now. He grabs her hand and hurries her to the car.

  “Will you help me, Rajat?”

  The men are closer now, goonda types, he can see: flashy nylon shirts, thick chains around their necks. One calls out, “Come on, bhaiya, join us for a drink. And your girlfriend, too.”

  Korobi doesn’t notice. “Until I find him, Rajat, I’m not sure I can get married.”

  He pushes her into the car. Locks her door. At least she knows enough to lean over and unlock the driver’s side.

  As he slips inside the car and locks his door, too, the man sneers, “Looks like the bhaiya got scared! Eh, bhaiya, we were only being sociable.”

  Heat pulses inside Rajat’s head. The city is going to the dogs, even this beautiful riverbank. He wishes he carried a gun, like some of his friends do. He has a flash vision of pointing it at the man’s face, seeing his features crumple. In his mind he says, Let’s see who’s scared now, bhaiya.

  He takes a deep breath. Back away from trouble, Rajat. You need to be Cara’s support right now. Plus, Papa and Maman have enough problems—the gallery in America, their money troubles here. And now this news about Cara’s father. He needs to figure out how to contain it, like a radioactive leak. As for that daft notion of hers that she can’t get married until she finds Rob, Rajat hopes that a good night’s sleep will rid her of it.

  “We’ve got to tell your parents.” Korobi puts a hand on his arm. “I know they will want to know. They are like parents to me already, but they will understand I need to find my own papa before the wedding. . . . Will you tell them for me? Right now, it’s too painful for me to go over it again.”

  He inclines his head, a motion that could be a yes or a no, and turns the key in the ignition. The last thing his parents need right now is to have to deal with this disconcerting development. He’s going to do all he can to keep it from them.

  The car roars to life, gratifyingly obedient, carrying them to safety.

  I sit on the edge of my chair in the investigator’s office, hands clasped tight, watching the man’s face. Mr. Sen does not look happy; his brow is creased as he hands back the photograph I gave him at our last meeting. It’s an old Polaroid, the colors faded. In it, two young women dressed in jeans and sweatshirts stand in front of a tall, pointy tower. A shadow has fallen over one woman’s face so her features are blurred, but the other woman can be seen quite clearly.

  The night I told Rajat about my father, I found the photo on my bed, with a note attached:

  I found this tonight, searching through your grandfather’s papers. I’d been hoping he loved Anu too much to destroy every single image of hers. She sent us this photo to us just a few months after she went to America.

  There’s something else I remembered: A week or so before her accident, I had asked Anu where she planned to live when she went back to America. She was careful not to mention your father, but she did tell me that they were thinking of moving to the East Coast because of a job opportunity.

  I lifted the photo with shaking fingers. At last I was to see my mother, my real mother and not the mournful, mouthless silhouette of my dream. I knew her right away—those serious, straight eyebrows were the ones I saw whenever I looked in the mirror. But she was her own person, too, with her generous, strong-willed, beautiful mouth. She smiled with such vivacity into the camera that I was sure my father had been the photographer. Indeed, when I turned it over, a bold script stated, To lovely Anu. My heart raced. Halfway across the world, before I had even been imagined, my father had handed this piece of paper to my mother. Perhaps their hands had touched and she had shyly smiled—it would have been in the early days, soon after they met. I ran my fingers across the back, over where their fingers had rested. It was as close to touching the two of them as I had ever been. In a strange way, it made my father possible.

  How could I remain angry with a grandmother who had given me such a gift? Now that I was calmer, I could see how impossible it would have been for her to stand up against Grandfather. His will, which I had always thought of as protecting and supporting me, would in this case have been an avalanche, crushing everything in its path.

  I went into the bedroom. She was sitting by the shuttered windows in the melancholy, slatted moonlight. I sat by her. We didn’t speak, but I leaned into her and felt something begin to mend, as when one blind end of a fractured bone finds its partner under the skin. And here’s something strange: I was still furious with Grandfather, but a question rose up through my anger. Of all the photos of my mother, why had he chosen to save this one? Had some subterranean part of his mind recoiled from cutting me off totally from my father?

  Now I knew what my dream-mother had wanted. She wanted me to understand that I had a future across the ocean, someone waiting there for me, although he didn’t realize it yet. The photo had
cemented my decision to find my father, the man who had shared my mother’s smiles, the unwritten half of her tender letter, the presence at the other end of the camera. But I wasn’t sure how to go about it.

  Filled with a restless hope, I started searching the Internet that same night, typing random words into the browser, peering hopefully into the infinite blue of the computer for a directive. Rob, Anu Roy, University of California, Berkeley, International Relations, marriage records, East Coast, the approximate dates of my mother’s sojourn in America. But though the machine spewed up an enormous number of entries (were there really sixty-two men at the university during those years nicknamed Rob?), it was unable to offer me a definitive lead. I would need professional assistance.

  That night I slept fitfully with the photo under my pillow, dreaming of my parents walking down an oleander pathway arm in arm, my earnest mother, the blank, white oval of my father’s face. As soon as it was morning, I called Rajat’s mobile.

  “Will you help me find a private detective?”

  I must have startled him from sleep, for he blurted what was on his mind without attempting diplomacy. Had I gone crazy? Didn’t I remember what he’d advised last night, that I should let things be? In any case, he didn’t know such men. Decent families didn’t have anything to do with them.

  I held on to my temper. He had been my anchor the night before, and I was grateful for his strength. But I couldn’t so easily give up the possibility of finding my father, not even for the man I loved.

  “I’ll find a detective myself, then.”

  “How?” He sounded annoyed and amused at the same time—as though I were a child to be humored.

  “I’ll ask Mimi. Just last month during lunch break she said her cousin had hired someone to find out if her husband was cheating on her—”