But I pushed back the feeling of having been betrayed and told myself, She’s happy, that’s all that matters.
And so for the rest of the visit we spoke only of innocuous things: the fun-filled times of our childhood, new recipes Runu had learned from her mother-in-law, the shopping I’d done in preparation for America. When I left we hugged each other, promising that we’d never lose touch even though I was going so far away. But once I was on the train I leaned my head against the hard wooden seat back and stared out at the parched afternoon sky and thought of the little things that disturbed me, things I would have ordinarily told Runu about. The way her mother-in-law would sometimes appear in the middle of our conversations so that I’d look up to find her watching me and Runu from the door. The way one of Runu’s brothers-in-law had made a rude comment when she’d burnt the rice pudding. The way Ramesh, who’d returned from his business tour a couple of days before I left, had scolded her, his voice rising in irritation, Arundhati, how many times have I told you not to mess up the newspaper before I’ve read it. I wondered if my husband in America would speak to me the same way.
The train gave a sudden lurch as it changed tracks, causing me to bump my head hard against the wood bench. The beginnings of a headache gripped my skull so fiercely that I ground my knuckles into my eyes. And when the tears came I couldn’t tell whether I was crying from tiredness or pain or fear of what the future held for us both.
But of course I was being adolescent, melodramatic. Four years have passed since and we are happy enough. Our husbands are kind and dependable and take good care of us. In the Indian culture, that is the same as love.
I feel additionally fortunate because in Sunil I’ve found a friend, someone to discuss the perplexities of America with, someone who understands on evenings when I look up and the skyline with its palm-tree silhouettes is so like home that my throat tightens with loneliness. Oh, we’ve had our quarrels—mostly about money, of which Sunil is far more careful than I. Sometimes when I bought something I shouldn’t have, he shouted that I was a spendthrift, letting money flow through my fingers like water. Your mother should have married you to a maharajah, not a mere working man like myself. Sometimes he stormed out of the house and didn’t come back till late at night. I cried on those nights, sitting in the kitchen, keeping his dinner warm in the oven, waiting. Still, I know I have it better than most of the girls I grew up with.
Sunil was the one who urged me to go back to school to get a degree in education. He didn’t mind fixing dinner when I had evening classes. He let me practice abysmally inept model lessons on him and stayed up with me those nights before exams when I was too nervous to sleep. At the graduation ceremony next year, I know he’ll be in the front row, cheering, as I go up to receive my diploma. Though Runu looks forward to going back to her mother’s house for the delivery, as is the custom, and laments the fact that I can’t, I’m not unhappy. In India they don’t let husbands into the labor room. And I know that I’ll need Sunil with me, holding my hand, sharing the pain and the triumph of our baby’s birth.
Runu doesn’t say much about her husband. Sometimes I’ll ask and a shy note will come into her voice, and she’ll change the subject. Even in her letters she is cautious, understated, writing only about tangibles—the jasmine she planted underneath their window last spring because he likes the smell, how tall it’s grown; the intricate design, cream and red and navy-blue, of the new sweater she knitted for him. (Like a good wife, she never calls him by his name, even in letters.) How pleased he’s been because his mother’s cough improved after she started taking the herbal tablets Runu had sent away for. It is hard for us Indian women to talk openly of love.
But she’s happy, I’m sure of it. I would sense it otherwise. I feel her growing into her household, spreading her tendrils like the jasmine she has planted, dispensing fragrance and shade enough to win anyone’s heart.
And now, to make everything perfect, the babies are coming.
The doctors waiting room is decorated in pastels, pale blues and pinks designed to soothe the anxieties of expectant mothers and fathers. They have no effect on Sunil and me as we fidget in our plush pastel chairs. The doctor is forty-five minutes late. Complications with a delivery, the nurse assures us smilingly. But I’m certain his delay has to do with the test results we’re waiting for. He’s probably sitting in his office right now, head in his hands, agonizing over how to tell us. I glance at Sunil, but he’s no help. He dabs at his upper hp, then clutches my palm damply.
What will I—we—do if …? But my mind, freezing on that thought, refuses to proceed further. I stare at the cover of the magazine on the table in front of us until I think that the face of Princess Diana will be etched forever in my memory.
But once again I’ve tortured myself needlessly. The doctor breezes in, smiling plumply and waving a sheet. All is well with our baby—and it’s a boy! We follow him with sheepish, relieved grins to the examination room where he measures my abdomen, declares himself pleased with my progress, and invites us to listen to our baby’s heartbeat. It sounds like a runaway engine, full of furious energy. I cry, and even Sunil looks away and wipes at his eyes. The doctor pats us indulendy and tells us to come back in a month.
On the way home, we stop at the China lion, our favorite restaurant, to celebrate. We splurge on hot and sour soup, spring rolls, eggplant in black bean sauce, sweet and sour shrimp, and pork chow mein. Recklessly, I eat a whole plateful of the extra spicy kung pao chicken which always gives me heartburn. But I know nothing can go wrong today. The fortune in my cookie reads, A wonderful event is about to occur in your life soon.
Before we sleep, we make love. When Sunil kisses the curves of my breasts and hip and thigh, I cry again. In spite of my bloated body, I know I am beautiful. I cannot remember how unhappiness feels. Afterward, I he nestled in the warm hollow of his shoulder, listening to the rhythm of his slow, deep breathing. I place my palm over my belly and picture my baby sleeping inside, curled up and as large (I know this from my pregnancy book) as a lemon. I think I feel a special warmth, a tingly yellow sunshiny warmth, radiating into my hand. I must ask Runu if she feels it too. But it’s still too early to call India.
Sometimes in the middle of the most mundane activities—driving or washing dishes or doing pelvic tilt exercises to strengthen my back—a wave of thankfulness surges through me, so powerful that I have to stop whatever I’m doing. I whisper a prayer of gratitude that my baby has come to me so easily—almost unasked, like grace—as soon as Sunil and I started thinking that it would be nice to have a family. I know the stories. Women chastised, even beaten, because they couldn’t have children. Women whose husbands stopped loving them because they’d reneged on the unspoken wedding contract. Women from whose faces people averted their eyes because they were bad luck.
I love my baby with a fierce abandonment that I find amazing. Already I am willing to die for him. To kill. But I have a feeling that Runu loves her baby even more intensely, with a passion that I can only guess at, a desperate tenderness. This is because she’s been trying to get pregnant ever since her marriage.
Five years might not seem that long to people in America, but where we come from, it is. Marriages can be broken in half that time, and barren wives sent back to their parents’ home in shame. Runu’s in-laws, of course, weren’t like that. Still, I felt the growing tension between the words of her letters, in the pauses of her voice. And once in a while my mother would write about things. Runu’s mother-in-law had taken her to the shrine of Shasthi, goddess of childbirth. The family priest had asked Runu to wear a good-luck amulet on a copper chain around her waist to appease the angry planets. They’d taken her for a medical checkup to make sure there were no “problems” with her system.
The day I received the last piece of information, I was so furious that I called my mother even though I’d just phoned her the previous week. I really wanted to call Runu, but I was afraid it would get her into trouble.
&nb
sp; “Did her husband go for a checkup too?” I shouted over the crackling line.
My mother, who is usually an outspoken woman, was strangely silent. Then she’d said, “That’s how they do things here, Anju. Have you forgotten?”
“Why is it always taken to be the woman’s fault?” I fumed to Sunil when he came home that night. “If I were Runu, I’d just pack my bags and leave!”
I’d expected him to be shocked and angry, like myself. Sympathetic. But he merely shrugged and said, “It’s a man’s world in India. Runu’s in-laws are a lot better than some others I could name. And anyway, where would Runu go if she left?”
There was a disturbing tone in his voice. See how lucky you are to have a husband like me, to live in this free and easy American culture, it seemed to say. You’d better start working harder at being a good wife. Or else.
“You shouldn’t have called India twice in two weeks,” Sunil was saying. “Don’t you remember how huge the phone bill was last month?”
Indignation—for myself as well as Runu—had made me bold. “You’re such a penny-pincher, I can’t believe it!” I snapped in a tone I’d never used with him before. “Such a tyrant. You’re no different from all those men in India. A woman is nothing but a baby machine to you.”
“You need a reality check, Anjali,” said Sunil in a tone cold with displeasure. I knew how angry he was by the fact that he used my full name. “Then perhaps you’d be a bit more grateful.”
I’d retreated with a pillow and blanket to the family-room couch, where I wept long, hot tears at the unfairness of a world which insisted not only that women had to have husbands but that they had to be grateful to them. But all the time I felt guilty for saying the things I had, and when Sunil called me to come to bed I’d wiped my eyes carefully and gone back.
All that’s behind us, though, now that the babies are on their way. Sunil has grown so loving that sometimes I tell him—and I’m only half joking—that I wouldn’t mind being pregnant forever. In the early months when I suffered from nausea and couldn’t stand the smell of cooking, he took over the kitchen. I remember him going through piles of cookbooks trying to find something that would tempt me to eat. Even now each week he drives to Mumtaz Cuisine, clear at the other end of town, to get rasogollahs, my favorite sweet. He massages my back and brings me hot milk in bed. Sometimes when I wake at night I find his hand resting on my stomach, careful and cupped, as though to protect us both.
And it’s the same with Runu. Nothing is too good for her. At mealtimes she’s served first, with the biggest, best portions—the coveted fish heads stewed with lentils and sprinkled with lemon, the creamy top layer of the sugary rice pudding she loves. New saris every time her husband comes back from a trip. Perfume, chocolates, recently even a pair of gold earrings. She gets to sleep in late, to lie down in the afternoons. Her brothers-in-law are not allowed to pester her with demands for new dishes. And her redoubtable mother-in-law, usually so stringent with money, has actually bought imported prenatal vitamins which she urges Runu to take every morning at breakfast!
The shrilling of the alarm startles me from sleep. I shut it off and lean over Sunil, who moans in protest, to reach for the phone. It is 1 A.M., early afternoon in India, our agreed-upon time. I know Runu will be waiting by the phone. I smile with the delicious anticipation of telling her everything that’s happened.
But when I finally get through, Runu isn’t the one who picks up the phone. Someone whose voice I don’t recognize—one of the brothers-in-law, perhaps—tells me she’s resting. He hesitates when I insist I must talk to her, then tells me to hold. He’s gone a long time. I chew on the inside of my cheek and try not to think of the phone bill.
Finally Runu’s on the line. She sounds dreadfully tired, her voice a dead monotone I hardly recognize.
“Are you sick?” I ask, frightened. “Shall I call some other time?”
“No,” she says, then adds, with obvious effort, “How’s your baby?”
“Fine,” I say, “he’s fine.” There’s an awkward silence full of all the things I want to tell her, the question I am afraid to ask but finally must.
“My baby’s OK too,” she replies, then makes a small choking sound. “Can’t talk anymore now,” she says.
The line goes dead.
I sit there holding on to the phone. The muted dial tone buzzes in my ear for a while, then the metallic bleeps, then a female American voice instructing me in polite tones to replace the receiver. Obediently, woodenly, I do as it says. Something’s very wrong, but I can’t figure out what. If Runu’s OK, and her baby’s OK—could it be Ramesh? I want to slap myself for not having asked. My mind had been too full of the babies, the lacy fins of their limbs undulating within our wombs. I dial India again.
This time I have to try for an hour before I get the long-distance connection. My eyes are burning with tiredness. I can hardly keep them open.
“Go to bed,” Sunil wakes up and tells me. “You’ll make yourself sick. What’s so important that it can’t wait till tomorrow?”
I glower at him in silence as I continue to dial.
But when I get her, my mother doesn’t know what it is either. It can’t be a death or a major accident, or someone would have informed her.
“Go to sleep now,” she says. “I’ll call you if it’s something really serious. Stop crying so much, it’s bad for you—and for my grandson.”
Her grandson. I quieten myself to consider the statement. This little life inside me, which I’d always thought of as totally mine, already belongs to so many other people. Grandson, cousin, son of his father. And it’s the same with Runu’s baby.
Into the silence my mother says—mostly to console me, I think—“Maybe it’s nothing. You know how pregnant women get emotional for no reason.”
I don’t believe it, but it’s what I repeat to myself as I fie down, pushing my aching spine against Sunil, who is asleep again. Without waking he puts out his hand, finds my hip, and strokes the stretch marks that line it like silken seams. His breath ruffles the small hairs on the back of my neck until I, too, sleep.
The next morning I don’t go to school although I know I’ll miss my psychology midterm with Professor Warner, who doesn’t allow makeups. I’m afraid to leave the phone even to go to the bathroom, though by now it’s past midnight in India. But I imagine Runu tiptoeing down the dark staircase of the sleeping house and lifting the receiver with trembling fingers. I have to be here for her.
By evening I’m exhausted from waiting. My shoulders ache as though I’ve been pushing a huge rock uphill. All I’ve managed to eat all day are some saltines clipped in milk.
Sunil’s face grows heavy when he returns from work to find me curled up on the sofa by the phone, still in my nightgown, wads of damp Kleenex strewn around me. “Anjali,” he says, “I know your cousin is really important to you, but this kind of obsessive behavior isn’t helping either you or her.”
He pushes me into the shower, promising to call me if the phone rings. “Take a long, hot one,” he commands. He hands me a new bar of the Mysore sandalwood soap that we save for special occasions and the blue silk kaftan Mother sent for my last birthday. By the time I come out, he has dinner ready—fried rice with shrimp, tofu with stir-fried green beans, and lemon chicken, all in the gay little red-and-white take-out containers from the China Lion.
“Voila!” he says with a sweeping bow.
I have to laugh. “Wrong language,” I say, suddenly ravenous.
I’m having a nightmare, one of those where you know you’re dreaming, but that doesn’t make it any less terrifying. In my nightmare my baby is trapped somewhere underwater, far from me. He lifts a tiny black receiver to call me for help. I hear the muffled ringing of the phone and try to run to it, but my limbs are like stone. I cannot move even a finger. A submarine wind starts to blow. The water, quiet until now, rushes swirling around my little boy, rips the phone from his fingers. It forms itself into a whirling mass around him
, sucking him in. His face crumples as he goes under. Anju, he cries, Anju-anju-anju …
“Anju, wake up,” calls Sunil. He’s leaning over me, shaking me gently. “It’s Runu.” He puts the phone into my numb hand.
There’s a lot of disturbance on the line. I can hardly hear Runu’s voice as she says hello. Then I realize it’s not a faulty connection. It’s the background noise of some public place—bells ringing, people shouting questions, the clang of machines, the distant roar of a bus. My heart begins to pound crazily. Normally Runu would never be allowed to go somewhere like that—and certainly not by herself.
“I’m at the main post office,” says Runu, her sentences short and jerky. “Couldn’t talk from home. Took a cycle-rickshaw here. They think I’m in my room, sleeping.”
“What’s wrong, Runu? I’ve been worried sick. Is it Ramesh? Or your mother-in-law?”
“No,” says Runu. “They’re fine,” she adds with venom.
Then she says, “They want to kill my baby.”
“What?” I’m sure I’ve heard it wrong.
“They want me to have an abortion.”
I can’t handle this alone. I motion for Sunil to pick up the extension in the family room. But already I know—how could I not have guessed earlier—what Runu is about to say. I remember the show some time back on “60 Minutes” about the increasing popularity of amniocenteses in India.
“The amnio showed that it’s a girl.” Runu’s voice is a hollow echo against my ear. “My mother-in-law says it’s not fitting that the eldest child of the Bhattacharjee household should be a female.”
“But Ramesh—what does he say?”
“He agrees, at least for this time. He says I’m young and strong. We can start trying for another baby right away. If it’s a girl again, then he’ll think about whether to keep it or not.”
I am too stunned to speak.
“I wept and begged. I even threatened suicide. But they’re adamant….”
Arranged Marriage: Stories Page 18
