Grandpa-uncle took me outside and told me that I mustn’t talk to Mother that way, that she had many troubles and that I must be an especially good daughter to her and help take care of her. He held me on his lap and stroked my hair as he talked, as though I were a baby, and I didn’t protest like I normally would have. Then, until dinnertime, he pointed out the different stars and told me their stories. He showed me the black warrior with his sword, the seven wise men who can tell when the end of the world will be, and the Dhruva star named for the little boy who went into the forest and met God.
Late in the night a sound woke me. At first I thought it was Mother, crying again, but then I realized it was coming from the alcove where Grandpa-uncle slept ever since he gave us his bedroom. I tiptoed over and he was lying with his kurta unbuttoned, rubbing at his chest, breathing heavily, trying to be silent.
“Where does it hurt, Grandpa-uncle?”
He pointed to his chest and I rubbed it for a while, feeling the crisp white curly hairs under my palm. Then he said he felt much better and made me go back to bed so that Mother wouldn’t wake up.
“Don’t tell her anything,” he whispered when I was at the door. “She’ll just worry.”
The next morning he looked as good as ever, so that I wondered if I had dreamed it all. He carried our bags to the station and blessed us when we touched his feet, and just before we left he slipped something wrapped in a piece of cloth into my palm.
“Don’t open it till you’re on the train,” he said in my ear. Then, straightening up, “the next time you’re here we’ll go swimming together.”
“That’s right,” Mother said, smiling at me, “and you’ll be able to show Uncle how well you learned to swim.”
Her eyes were all shiny and lit up, so I nodded and tried to smile back although my lips felt stiff and dry, their edges ready to crack, like leather chappals left too long in the sun.
Now the train was moving. Grandpa-uncle waved at us from the platform and I waved back, craning my neck through the window so I could see him as long as possible, even though Mother warned me I would get coal dust in my eyes.
“I don’t know why you’re carrying on like this,” she said a bit irritably when I finally sat down. “We’ll come to see him—all three of us—next puja vacation.”
I wanted to tell her how, as the train picked up speed, Grandpa-uncle had become smaller and smaller until he was no bigger than a matchstick doll. And then he had disappeared. But Mother was frowning, biting at her lower lip and rummaging through her purse for something, so I didn’t say it. Instead, I looked up at the sky. It was full of monsoon clouds, black and crinkly like bats’ wings. That was when I knew she had deceived me, that nothing was going to happen the way she said it would.
I turned to face her, the anger thick and hot as melted metal filling my arms and legs, rising from my stomach into my throat so I could spit it out at her. I gathered my breath for it. But when I saw her eyes, wide like a little girl’s as she reread the letter, I realized she hadn’t been lying on purpose. She just didn’t know the way I did.
The compartment seemed to turn end over end in slow motion, so that I had to lean back into the hard wooden bench. Everything I stared at—bunks, suitcases, windows, sky—appeared to be upside down. Would they ever right themselves again?
“I told you all that coal dust would make you sick,” Mother said, an edge of satisfaction beneath the concern in her voice. “Here, you’d better take some amchur.”
I silently put a pinch of the sour grains under my tongue. When Mother was busy with the letter once more, I went back to the window and leaned my forehead against its rusty bars. And as I waited for the velvet-green fields of young rice to turn back into city walls crusted with soot and graffiti and spat-out wads of betel leaf, I held the packet Grandpa-uncle had given me tight in my fist. I didn’t need to open it. I knew already what was inside.
I kept it for a long time, the silver ring from our fish, secreted in the bottom of an underwear drawer, or in the pocket of a dusty suitcase. I changed its hiding place often so that Mother would not find it and ask questions. Not that she would have—she had more serious things to worry about. From time to time, when things got bad, I would shut myself in my room, take out the ring, and hold it in my hand until the cool metal grew blood-warm. I would run my finger over the runes, wishing I could speak the spell to take me back to that day at the lake with Grandpa-uncle. Sometimes I pressed it to my lips and whispered words I had memorized from books about magic that I borrowed from the library. But none of them ever worked, so perhaps it was not a magic ring at all. Still, I took it wherever Mother and I moved, even when we had to travel real light, real quick. I never knew what Father would do to the things we left behind. One time he burned them. One time he threw them all in the rubbish heap. When we returned he bought us everything new, shiny-bright, as though the past were only a word, with no real meaning to it.
Then once we had to leave in the middle of the night, too suddenly to take anything with us. Mother stumbled behind me down the lightless passage—we hadn’t dared to switch on the light—holding the wadded end of her sari to her face, the blood seeping through its white like a dark, crumpled flower. I pulled at her hand to hurry her along, my own shoulder still throbbing from when Father had flung me against the wall as I tried to stop him. When we came back a few weeks later (this time even before our bruises had faded all the way) I looked for the ring everywhere. But it was gone.
CLOTHES
THE WATER OF THE WOMEN’S LAKE LAPS AGAINST MY breasts, cool, calming. I can feel it beginning to wash the hot nervousness away from my body. The little waves tickle my armpits, make my sari float up around me, wet and yellow, like a sunflower after rain. I close my eyes and smell the sweet brown odor of the ritha pulp my friends Deepali and Radha are working into my hair so it will glisten with little lights this evening. They scrub with more vigor than usual and wash it out more carefully, because today is a special day. It is the day of my bride-viewing.
“Ei, Sumita! Mita! Are you deaf?” Radha says. “This is the third time I’ve asked you the same question.”
“Look at her, already dreaming about her husband, and she hasn’t even seen him yet!” Deepali jokes. Then she adds, the envy in her voice only half hidden, “Who cares about friends from a little Indian village when you’re about to go live in America?”
I want to deny it, to say that I will always love them and all the things we did together through my growing-up years—visiting the charak fair where we always ate too many sweets, raiding the neighbors guava tree summer afternoons while the grown-ups slept, telling fairy tales while we braided each others hair in elaborate patterns we’d invented. And she married the handsome prince who took her to his kingdom beyond the seven seas. But already the activities of our girlhood seem to be far in my past, the colors leached out of them, like old sepia photographs.
His name is Somesh Sen, the man who is coming to our house with his parents today and who will be my husband “if I’m lucky enough to be chosen,” as my aunt says. He is coming all the way from California. Father showed it to me yesterday, on the metal globe that sits on his desk, a chunky pink wedge on the side of a multicolored slab marked Untd. Sts. of America. I touched it and felt the excitement leap all the way up my arm like an electric shock. Then it died away, leaving only a beaten-metal coldness against my fingertips.
For the first time it occurred to me that if things worked out the way everyone was hoping, I’d be going halfway around the world to live with a man I hadn’t even met. Would I ever see my parents again? Don’t send me so far away, I wanted to cry, but of course I didn’t. It would be ungrateful. Father had worked so hard to find this match for me. Besides, wasn’t it every woman’s destiny, as Mother was always telling me, to leave the known for the unknown? She had done it, and her mother before her. A married woman belongs to her husband, her in-laws. Hot seeds of tears pricked my eyelids at the unfairness of it.
“Are you nervous?” Radha asks as she wraps my hair in a soft cotton towel. Her parents are also trying to arrange a marriage for her. So far three families have come to see her, but no one has chosen her because her skin-color is considered too dark. “Isn’t it terrible, not knowing what’s going to happen?”
I nod because I don’t want to disagree, don’t want to make her feel bad by saying that sometimes it’s worse when you know what’s coming, like I do. I knew it as soon as Father unlocked his mahogany almirah and took out the sari.
It was the most expensive sari I had ever seen, and surely the most beautiful. Its body was a pale pink, like the dawn sky over the women’s lake. The color of transition. Embroidered all over it were tiny stars made out of real gold zari thread.
“Here, hold it,” said Father.
The sari was unexpectedly heavy in my hands, silk-slippery, a sari to walk carefully in. A sari that could change one’s life. I stood there holding it, wanting to weep. I knew that when I wore it, it would hang in perfect pleats to my feet and shimmer in the light of the evening lamps. It would dazzle Somesh and his parents and they would choose me to be his bride.
When the plane takes off, I try to stay calm, to take deep, slow breaths like Father does when he practices yoga. But my hands clench themselves on to the folds of my sari and when I force them open, after the fasten seat belt and no smoking signs have blinked off, I see they have left damp blotches on the delicate crushed fabric.
We had some arguments about this sari. I wanted a blue one for the journey, because blue is the color of possibility, the color of the sky through which I would be traveling. But Mother said there must be red in it because red is the color of luck for married women. Finally, Father found one to satisfy us both: midnight-blue with a thin red border the same color as the marriage mark I’m wearing on my forehead.
It is hard for me to think of myself as a married woman. I whisper my new name to myself, Mrs. Sumita Sen, but the syllables rustle uneasily in my mouth like a stiff satin that’s never been worn.
Somesh had to leave for America just a week after the wedding. He had to get back to the store, he explained to me. He had promised his partner. The store. It seems more real to me than Somesh—perhaps because I know more about it. It was what we had mostly talked about the night after the wedding, the first night we were together alone. It stayed open twenty-four hours, yes, all night, every night, not like the Indian stores which closed at dinnertime and sometimes in the hottest part of the afternoon. That’s why his partner needed him back.
The store was called 7-Eleven. I thought it a strange name, exotic, risky. All the stores I knew were piously named after gods and goddesses—Ganesh Sweet House, Lakshmi Vastralaya for Fine Saris—to bring the owners luck.
The store sold all kinds of amazing things—apple juice in cardboard cartons that never leaked; American bread that came in cellophane packages, already cut up; canisters of potato chips, each large grainy flake curved exactly like the next. The large refrigerator with see-through glass doors held beer and wine, which Somesh said were the most popular items.
“That’s where the money comes from, especially in the neighborhood where our store is,” said Somesh, smiling at the shocked look on my face. (The only places I knew of that sold alcohol were the village toddy shops, “dark, stinking dens of vice,” Father called them.) “A lot of Americans drink, you know. It’s a part of their culture, not considered immoral, like it is here. And really, there’s nothing wrong with it.” He touched my lips lightly with his finger. “When you come to California, I’ll get you some sweet white wine and you’ll see how good it makes you feel….” Now his fingers were stroking my cheeks, my throat, moving downward. I closed my eyes and tried not to jerk away because after all it was my wifely duty.
“It helps if you can think about something else,” my friend Madhavi had said when she warned me about what most husbands demanded on the very first night. Two years married, she already had one child and was pregnant with a second one.
I tried to think of the women’s lake, the dark cloudy green of the shapla leaves that float on the water, but his lips were hot against my skin, his fingers fumbling with buttons, pulling at the cotton night-sari I wore. I couldn’t breathe.
“Bite hard on your tongue,” Madhavi had advised. “The pain will keep your mind off what’s going on down there.”
But when I bit down, it hurt so much that I cried out. I couldn’t help it although I was ashamed. Somesh lifted his head. I don’t know what he saw on my face, but he stopped right away. “Shhh,” he said, although I had made myself silent already. “It’s OK, we’ll wait until you feel like it.” I tried to apologize but he smiled it away and started telling me some more about the store.
And that’s how it was the rest of the week until he left. We would lie side by side on the big white bridal pillow I had embroidered with a pair of doves for married harmony, and Somesh would describe how the store’s front windows were decorated with a flashing neon Dewar’s sign and a lighted Budweiser waterfall this big. I would watch his hands moving excitedly through the dim air of the bedroom and think that Father had been right, he was a good man, my husband, a kind, patient man. And so handsome, too, I would add, stealing a quick look at the strong curve of his jaw, feeling luckier than I had any right to be.
The night before he left, Somesh confessed that the store wasn’t making much money yet. “I’m not worried, I’m sure it soon will,” he added, his fingers pleating the edge of my sari. “But I just don’t want to give you the wrong impression, don’t want you to be disappointed.”
In the half dark I could see he had turned toward me. His face, with two vertical lines between the brows, looked young, apprehensive, in need of protection. I’d never seen that on a man’s face before. Something rose in me like a wave.
“It’s all right,” I said, as though to a child, and pulled his head down to my breast. His hair smelled faintly of the American cigarettes he smoked. “I won’t be disappointed. I’ll help you.” And a sudden happiness filled me.
That night I dreamed I was at the store. Soft American music floated in the background as I moved between shelves stocked high with brightly colored cans and elegant-necked bottles, turning their labels carefully to the front, polishing them until they shone.
Now, sitting inside this metal shell that is hurtling through emptiness, I try to remember other things about my husband: how gentle his hands had been, and his lips, surprisingly soft, like a woman’s. How I’ve longed for them through those drawn-out nights while I waited for my visa to arrive. He will be standing at the customs gate, and when I reach him, he will lower his face to mine. We will kiss in front of everyone, not caring, like Americans, then pull back, look each other in the eye, and smile.
But suddenly, as I am thinking this, I realize I cannot recall Somesh’s face. I try and try until my head hurts, but I can only visualize the black air swirling outside the plane, too thin for breathing. My own breath grows ragged with panic as I think of it and my mouth fills with sour fluid the way it does just before I throw up.
I grope for something to hold on to, something beautiful and talismanic from my old life. And then I remember. Some-where down under me, low in the belly of the plane, inside my new brown case which is stacked in the dark with a hundred others, are my saris. Thick Kanjeepuram silks in solid purples and golden yellows, the thin hand-woven cottons of the Bengal countryside, green as a young banana plant, gray as the women’s lake on a monsoon morning. Already I can feel my shoulders loosening up, my breath steadying. My wedding Benarasi, flame-orange, with a wide palloo
of gold-embroidered dancing peacocks. Fold upon fold of Dhakais so fine they can be pulled through a ring. Into each fold my mother has tucked a small sachet of sandalwood powder to protect the saris from the unknown insects of America. Little silk sachets, made from her old saris—I can smell their calm fragrance as I watch the American air hostess wheeling the dinner cart toward my seat. It is the smell of my mother’s hands.
I know then that everything will be all right. And when the air hostess bends her curly golden head to ask me what I would like to eat, I understand every word in spite of her strange accent and answer her without stumbling even once over the unfamiliar English phrases.
Late at night I stand in front of our bedroom mirror trying on the clothes Somesh has bought for me and smuggled in past his parents. I model each one for him, walking back and forth, clasping my hands behind my head, lips pouted, left hip thrust out just like the models on TV, while he whispers applause. I’m breathless with suppressed laughter (Father and Mother Sen must not hear us) and my cheeks are hot with the delicious excitement of conspiracy. We’ve stuffed a towel at the bottom of the door so no light will shine through.
I’m wearing a pair of jeans now, marveling at the curves of my hips and thighs, which have always been hidden under the flowing lines of my saris. I love the color, the same pale blue as the nayantara flowers that grow in my parents’ garden. The solid comforting weight. The jeans come with a close-fitting T-shirt which outlines my breasts.
I scold Somesh to hide my embarrassed pleasure. He shouldn’t have been so extravagant. We can’t afford it. He just smiles.
The T-shirt is sunrise-orange—the color, I decide, of joy, of my new American life. Across its middle, in large black letters, is written Great America. I was sure the letters referred to the country, but Somesh told me it is the name of an amusement park, a place where people go to have fun. I think it a wonderful concept, novel. Above the letters is the picture of a train. Only it’s not a train, Somesh tells me, it’s a roller coaster. He tries to explain how it moves, the insane speed, the dizzy ground falling away, then gives up. “I’ll take you there, Mita sweetheart,” he says, “as soon as we move into our own place.”
Arranged Marriage: Stories Page 2
