Oleander Girl

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  “Please permit me to speak to the union leaders.”

  If his voice shakes, no one is aware of it in the din. Amazingly, the crowd parts for him. As he steps out, it surrounds him again and presses him toward the entrance of the warehouse.

  I stare at the phone, stubbornly mute in my hand. It’s as though the universe conspired to cut off communication between Rajat and me at the most crucial moment, to further our misunderstanding. I punch the green button several times. Nothing. I long to fling the phone across the room, but I can’t afford to break it. So instead I fling myself on the bed. Why did the phone have to die at exactly this moment? If only I’d had another minute to explain—

  But then the truth strikes me, shocking as a slap. The real problem isn’t the dead phone. Even if I could have talked to Rajat, what would I have said after he accused me—so crassly, so easily—of unfaithfulness? Where would I have found the words to convey how hurt I am that he could think I’d let go so lightly of my betrothal vows? If that’s what he thinks of me, he doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know me at all.

  And maybe I don’t know him. The Rajat branded into my heart—who placed his steady palm on my back and taught my stumbling self to dance at Mimi’s party, who tried to pull me from the quicksand of depression after Grandfather’s death, who pressed his face against my throat one drunken night and said he couldn’t live without me—would never have had such a low opinion of me. Or would he? Had I rushed into this engagement too quickly, putting my trust in gestures?

  Or was it that even the best of relationships withered if people were separated too soon? Did early love, which grew out of the body’s needs, require the body’s presence to nurture it? Without those wordless glances that made the heart race, without the touch of lips that sent electricity through the body, without a shoulder to lay the dispirited head on and arms to shore us up against the world’s cruelties, even the most affectionate words weren’t enough. But the cruel words—paradoxically, those gained power as they flew across the miles to stab at a listener’s heart.

  Still, my mother had done it. She had kept faith with a husband half a world away, when she was pregnant and fighting with my grandfather. She had held my father in her heart until she died. And I was her daughter.

  But what if my love for Rajat simply wasn’t enough?

  All these thoughts tumble through my exhausted brain as I press my face against a brown motel bedspread that smells of the loneliness of strangers and give way to tears. My life feels too heavy for me to shoulder alone. I’d thought myself strong and brave, smart and adventurous—but I wasn’t any of those things. I was just a girl who needed someone to hold me.

  I’m crying so hard that I almost don’t hear the knocking at the door. But the knocker is persistent; I realize he isn’t going to go away. Through the peephole, I see that it’s Vic, holding two steaming cups and some packaged sandwiches. I dry my eyes carefully. I don’t want the additional humiliation of his knowing that I broke down.

  He sets everything down on the rickety bedside table—that’s all the furniture the room has, except for the bed.

  “I got them from the machines downstairs. Sorry, they don’t have a diner. But the hot chocolate smells pretty good, and the egg-salad sandwiches look safe. It’s freezing in here! Why haven’t you turned up the heat?” He strides over to the thermostat, but even he can’t get it to work. Finally, he gives up and calls the desk to demand another room.

  I drink the hot chocolate in huge gulps even though it burns my mouth. I can feel its welcome warmth traveling through my body. It’s the most comforting drink I’ve ever had. I’m touched by Vic’s caring, especially in the wake of Rajat’s suspicion. But that suspicion has made me newly awkward. I’m acutely aware of our situation: we’re in my motel room at night, sitting on my bed. It’s exactly the kind of compromising scenario Rajat had imagined. The irony of it makes me want to laugh.

  I mumble my thanks into my cup, aware that I sound ungracious. But I can’t risk Vic’s mistaking my gratitude for a different kind of emotion. And he has a history. I remember Desai cautioning him to keep things professional, and it strikes me that he’d been cautioning me, too.

  “Why were you crying?”

  I look up, startled and chagrined. Loyalty to Rajat battles with my longing for sympathy.

  “What did he say to you?”

  “Please,” I manage. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  He’s silent. I feel my face growing hot. Finally he says, “It’s been a hell of a day for you. Let’s get you that new room. You’ll feel better after you take a hot shower and eat something.”

  He leans forward. I feel his lips on my forehead, a moment’s touch, like a falling petal. Somewhere there’s a memory of a similar kiss, its sweetness now turned to pain. I push it away. I keep my eyes closed. It takes all my willpower not to collapse into Vic’s chest. I must be faithful. I will be faithful. Is it wrong for me to want this moment not to end?

  NINE

  Sarojini is supervising a cleanup of the temple in preparation for Bhattacharya’s visit tomorrow night. The gardener boy scrubs the floor, coaxes spiderwebs from corners, and changes a burned-out bulb while Bahadur instructs him vociferously. The wicker chairs used for Korobi’s engagement, carried from the main house, create an ache inside Sarojini. The brass lamps are taken to the outdoor tap to be scrubbed with tamarind paste. Where is the large copper plate on which fruits are offered? No one seems to know. Beokoof! Bahadur yells at the boy in terrifying tones. But the boy is used to Bahadur and merely scratches his head. Sarojini wonders if other things are lost or stolen, things she has forgotten about. She finds she doesn’t care. Far bigger things in her life have gone missing, and, look, she has survived them.

  Their work done, the servants leave. Sarojini indulges her knee and sits on a chair to pray. The priest is late. Perhaps he’s late every day, and Sarojini hasn’t noticed. Since Bimal passed away, she only comes to the temple intermittently. The goddess, she feels, has let her down. It isn’t right, she tells her sometimes. After all the pujas I offered you, asking you to take me first, this just isn’t right.

  Sarojini chants the names of the goddess, but her truant mind wanders. This visit of Bhattacharya’s, it’s like a rock heaved into the still pond of her life. She’s not used to guests anymore. Over the last years, Bimal had grown reclusive and abrupt, so that only his oldest, most persistent friends ventured to visit them. After his death, Sarojini let even that fall away. She has made an exception for Bhattacharya because of the Boses. She has gathered, by interrogating a reluctant Rajat, that they need Bhattacharya’s assistance for their business to survive. Rajat, dear boy, would never ask for help, but Sarojini is determined to do what she can to further their cause.

  She abandons the flowery Sanskrit mantras for homespun Bengali importunings. Goddess, Mother of Miracles, could you soften up Bhattacharya a bit? And while you’re at it, throw the shawl of your protection over Rajat. The boy’s in trouble of some kind, something serious, I can feel it, though he won’t tell me the details.

  Sarojini thinks back on the dinner at the Boses’, tension hanging thick over that beautifully appointed dinner table like mist over the pond at sunrise behind her parents’ village home. Suddenly, a great homesickness comes over her. For her childhood, that simple, happy time when all her needs were taken care of; for her parents’ village, now across the border in another country she’ll never visit; for the dust from cattle hooves glowing in the setting sun as herds returned from the fields. As if to intensify her yearning, a car honks irately outside her gate, and other drivers join in the cacophony.

  She claps her hands over her ears and makes a decision. As soon as the no-moon puja is over tomorrow, she will go to Bimal’s ancestral village for a fortnight. There’s no need for her to languish here while Korobi is in the United States. She thinks of the village home, the old brick bungalow set deep in a mango orchard that she hasn’t seen for seventeen years becau
se Bimal refused to visit it, and is struck by resolution. She puts away her prayer beads and hurries to the house to make arrangements. Cook will come with her, like last time. And Bahadur—she’ll send him ahead, to clean up the house.

  From the doorway, Cook shouts, “Ma, Ma. Come quickly. Something terrible has happened.”

  Sarojini sighs. Ever since Bimal’s death, Cook has been skittery. The least little thing puts her in a panic. The other night, she awoke Sarojini, certain that someone was trying to break into the house, but when they checked (Cook armed with the fish-cutting bonti), they discovered it was only a branch scraping against a window. As Sarojini walks to the house, favoring her bad knee, she considers what to pack. Will she need her heavy shawl? Quilts, certainly, because the nights are colder in the village. A set of dishes, complete with utensils. Mosquito nets. The village mosquitoes, superior in size and aggression to their Kolkata cousins, are not to be taken lightly. She remembers the palm trees in the back, how the leaves whispered when the wind blew. So many nights she listened to them as she paced the terrace, carrying a colicky Korobi, her own insides still raw from having Anu ripped away. Still and all, it had been a healing place.

  But when Cook, wringing her hands, hurries Sarojini into one of the spare downstairs bedrooms, she sees that something terrible has, indeed, happened this time. Water is pouring down one of the walls. A pipe has obviously broken somewhere upstairs. It must have happened a good while back, because the water has pooled on the floor, too. She stares, aghast, at the Turkish carpet that has been in the family since before her marriage, now soggy and ruined beyond repair. Is this a bad omen? Finally she recovers enough to summon Bahadur to turn off the main water pipe and call a plumber. She paces in a fever of anxiety until the man arrives.

  The plumber’s news is as bad as Sarojini feared: large segments of pipe—not just the broken one—have corroded and will have to be replaced. Several walls in the house will have to be opened up to allow this. The job will take weeks and cost thousands of rupees, money she does not have.

  After the plumber does a few makeshift repairs and leaves, Sarojini sits down heavily on the bed, the edge of her sari trailing in the ankle-deep water. She sits there for a long time, and then she goes to the drawer where she usually throws miscellaneous items she doesn’t know what to do with. Cook comes by to ask how she is expected to cook lunch, now that the water is turned off, but Sarojini barely hears her. Her muscles ache with tension as she rummages through the debris of years. She knows she put the card in here, the card belonging to that man, what was his name, the one who came by, asking to buy the house? All she can remember is how much she had disliked him. Finally, frustrated to tears, she upends the drawer, scattering items all over the floor. There it is, the card with its glaring-red logo. She dials the number with a hand that shakes as though she had suddenly developed palsy.

  “Mr. Vikas Saxena, please.”

  “He is not in, madam,” a secretary intones. “May I take a message?”

  “It’s Mrs. Roy from twenty-six Tarak Prasad Roy Road, the old house that he wanted to buy and tear down. I’m ready to discuss his offer. But I need to talk to someone right away. Isn’t there anyone in the office?”

  “I will check, madam,” the girl says, her voice bored. “Please hold.”

  Sarojini holds—what choice does she have?—for an interminable period. Then, just when she is convinced that the girl has forgotten about her, a man comes on the line.

  “This is Mrs. Roy, calling from twenty-six Tarak Prasad Roy Road,” she starts again, but the man interrupts her.

  “Sarojini-ma, namaskar to you.”

  He speaks in Bengali, his accent thick but comprehensible. And familiar. Sarojini knows that voice from a long time ago.

  “Sardarji?” she whispers. “Is it you? Are you here in Kolkata?”

  “Yes, ma.”

  “But Bimal-babu told me that you had retired and gone back to your native place!”

  “I did go back to Ludhiana for some time, but I missed Kolkata—I’d lived here so long. So I came back, and now I’m one of Saxena’s overseers.”

  Sarojini braces herself and says, “Babu—passed away suddenly.” Talking about her loss still hurts.

  “I heard that from Saxena. I am so sorry. I wanted to call you, but I had promised Babu. That’s why I hesitated, even today—”

  “Promised Babu what?”

  “That I would stay away from the family.”

  “Why would he want you to do that?” Sarojini asks, confused. “You were the best driver we ever had.”

  “Babu wanted to make sure no one found out—especially you. Of course, I wouldn’t have said a word, but he thought that this way there was no chance of a slip.”

  “Found out what?” Sarojini’s body grows hot, then ice-cold. Not another secret, just when she thought she was finally done with them! “Tell me now. Whatever it was, I deserve to know it.”

  Sardarji doesn’t protest. Perhaps he agrees. “Soon after you went to the village, Korobi-baby’s father came to Kolkata. He started asking a lot of uncomfortable questions, about how Anu-missybaba died, and what happened to Baby. But Bimal-babu was ready for him. He gave him a fake certificate, stating Baby had also died in childbirth. He had it forged and stamped with court stamps, so that it would look official enough to fool Baby’s father. Babu hoped that then he would go back to America, and you folks could keep Baby. He had to pay a lot of people to keep their mouths shut—the forgers, the nurses in the infant-care ward, who knows how many others. He paid all of us servants handsomely, too—though we would never have said anything to that foreigner. None of us wanted you to have to give up Baby, who was the only family you had left.”

  “Oh,” says Sarojini. It is a sound that one might make if punched in the stomach. Sardarji’s words bring back the ache of those days, of losing Anu, of being terrified that she would lose the tiny, premature baby, too. But there’s another kind of pain she feels. The reason for so many things that she attributed to Bimal’s idiosyncrasy is becoming clear to her. Why she was so hurriedly sent to the village with the baby. Why she was made to stay there so long. Why most of the servants—including Sardarji—were gone by the time she returned. Why Bimal cut himself off from their social circle. Why he left so little money behind when he died.

  Still she cannot believe it completely. Still she must ask.

  “Korobi’s father came all the way to Kolkata?”

  “Oh, yes, ma. Just after you went to the village. Babu must have known he was coming because he’d already commissioned the forgers to create the fake certificate. I drove him to pick it up, and then I drove him to a big hotel. He had two certificates with him, and an urn of ashes.”

  Whose ashes could they have been? Sarojini wonders distractedly. Not Anu’s—those had already been offered into Ganga Sagar by then.

  “He gave it all to Baby’s father.”

  A sudden hope spikes in Sarojini’s chest. Here, perhaps, was some of the information Korobi so desperately needed. “Did you see—him? Did you hear anything they said?”

  “No. Babu was very careful, a true lawyer.” There’s admiration in Sardarji’s tone. “But when he got out of the hotel and into the car, he was really upset. He was cursing Baby’s father, using gutter language, words I didn’t even think he knew. That shocked me. As you know, babu despised people who couldn’t control their mouths. At one point he covered his face with his hands and cried out, ‘O Goddess, why this, on top of everything I’ve had to suffer? Of all the people in America, why should she have chosen him?’ Then he remembered me and didn’t say any more. Privacy and dignity were always most important to Bimal-babu.”

  “Was he angry because they’d had an argument?”

  “I don’t know. I think it must have been something worse, because Babu was upset the entire way home. Whatever it was, he kept tabs on the man until he left India—hired a detective, even. He was like a crazy man those days, Bimal-babu, snapping
at everyone, not sleeping, spending money like water. I was worried he would have a heart attack. Anu-missy’s death had already taken a toll on him. Only after that man got on the plane did Babu breathe easily.

  “It all paid off, though, in the end. Babu never heard from Baby’s father again, and Baby grew up safe with you.”

  Sarojini doesn’t trust herself to speak. She is overcome by shock and rage and a deep sorrow that Bimal had kept all this from her. That he had so little trust.

  “How is Baby now?” Sardarji says. “I would like to come and see her one of these days, if I may. And is it true that you are thinking of selling the house? If so, I can make sure Saxena gives you a fair deal.”

  Sarojini must have made the right responses—though she can’t remember what they were—because Sardarji sets up a date to come over with a preliminary contract and says his good-byes. After she hangs up, she sits with her head in her hands, unconsciously mimicking her husband from that fateful day long ago. Her mind moves in slow, fitful circles, like the grinding stone they used in her parents’ home to make lentil paste. Why had Bimal been so upset with Korobi’s father? What could have been so wrong with the man her daughter had loved to her death?

  Three days have passed since I returned from Boston, three days of misery and silence. Rajat hasn’t called, and though I long to hear his voice, I’ve vowed not to phone him. I’m afraid that if I do so, I’ll capitulate and tell him I love him. And I do. But I refuse to be treated as someone who can’t be trusted. He needs to admit the unfairness of his accusation, otherwise it’ll set a harmful pattern for our married life. I can’t let that happen.

  Things at Desai’s have been gloomy. No one at the university has given us any leads. No one has answered the newspaper ads, which are cutting deeper each week into my finances. At this rate, my money is going to run out long before it’s time for me to return to India. Even Desai’s losing hope; I can see it in his face.