China Room

by Sunjeev Sahota

  He nods, still crouching. The cool whites of his eyes are large in the gloom. ‘How long before everyone’s back?’

  ‘Until evening prayers, or maybe the first stars. They’ve still got to go to Kalyan’s field for gourds. For the saag.’ See? her look seems to say. I know things, too.

  He holds out his arm, his palm cupped at the end of it, beckoning. She moves, anklet bells sounding, warning, and holding her wrist he pulls her down so she’s crouching too. He lifts her tunic off her body, inside-outing it over her head. She shudders, her breasts open to the air and the breeze, nipples puckering. She can’t object even if she wants to. He is her husband and he takes off his own tunic too and as he presses towards her she closes her arms around his neck and feels herself leaning into the ground.

  * * *

  *

  How long had Suraj been watching Mehar? Long enough for the sun to move one whole degree along its path. For the grass to lengthen by the thickness of a fingernail. For the flock of starlings to abruptly pivot and zoom over the horizon, as if witnessing an event that had to be reported at once. He watched her. It was the first time he’d seen her, and he watched her. She was wrong about the crossed arms and piece of straw, and even about the lean into the doorway. He crouched as he watched, inside the entrance, his expression lost in shadow, his bare feet flat on the uneven ground. So this was his eldest brother’s wife, the venerated sister-in-law, the one to whom, in time, once she’d delivered a son, he’d have to show the deepest respect and courtesy. Revere her as a second mother. The one who could then ask him, as her youngest brother-in-law, to do whatever she wanted, whatever task. A small kittenish smile comes to his lips. She’s so much younger than him. And yet she is to be Mai’s successor! To hold that exalted office! It all makes sense to him now, looking at the sinewy bare calves, the wide lush mouth pursed in climbing concentration. The huge eyes. Her bright skin. The confusion hadn’t been a confusion at all. He had been right all along. His brother had changed his mind.

  * * *

  *

  Suraj had been playing his dhol for all of that afternoon when Mai and Jeet went visiting the brides, jamming and practising, trying to mimic the drummers he’d applauded and whistled during the parades the previous week. How fine they’d looked, in their azure tunics and peacock hats. How modern. And how eagerly the women had crowded the balconies to admire the young musicians. He was determined to be part of the parade the following year, if only his damned left hand would do as it was told. It kept falling in rhythm with his right, when he needed it to drum a three-quarter beat, a syncopation that filled the gaps. Still, he had seemed to be getting somewhere when he heard his brother and Mai return on the bullock cart. He carried on, adjusting the strap around his sweaty neck so the drum rested at an angle across his torso, ignoring their calls for him to come out into the yard. Finally, Jeet entered the room and asked him to please come, that Mai was waiting. Mohan was already there, wet and grubby from hosing down the animals, his hands bent back on his hips.

  ‘You could have given your brother a hand,’ Jeet suggested, as Suraj joined them without quite joining them, standing outside of their triangle and with his dhol still hanging off his neck.

  ‘Done nothing but play that flaming drum all afternoon,’ Mohan said. His eyes were bloodshot. He liked meeting the village drunks of an evening, Mohan did, but this vice was forgiven because he was also the hardest of workers. No matter the heat, he could be seen out there in the field, the alcohol sweating out of him.

  ‘The weddings are next month,’ Mai said. ‘We need all hands for the tilling, so after that. Maybe the seventeenth. It depends how the crops are looking.’

  ‘And their families are happy with that?’ Mohan asked.

  ‘They’ll do whatever they’re told. But go to the temple tomorrow. And be sure to tell the priest we’re keeping it small. No need for a big song and dance.’

  ‘Shame,’ Mohan said, cuffing Suraj’s ear. ‘You could have played your drum.’

  ‘We’ll do it all on the same day,’ Mai went on. ‘Their villages are close enough.’

  ‘It’ll be cheaper,’ Jeet explained.

  ‘And we won’t have to be away from home so much,’ Mohan reasoned.

  ‘Good,’ Mai said. ‘I’ll order some foreign cloth while we can. That Vijaypal near the corner stand seems to think he can still get some. And have that floor marbled, will you?’

  ‘The whole floor?’ asked Mohan, puffing out his cheeks. Another job for him.

  ‘The inside bit only. Don’t waste it outside their room.’

  ‘If you have to play your dhol, you’ll need to find somewhere else,’ Jeet said. ‘Like Mai says, that room’s theirs.’

  Suraj said nothing. He had no interest in getting married. There were no happy husbands as far as he could see. Or wives, for that matter. He only hoped she’d leave him alone, whoever she was. Even sex was no longer an enticing prospect, not now he’d acquainted himself with the city brothels. He scratched the back of his neck with the end of his drumstick – the strap was chafing again.

  ‘How old are they?’ Mohan asked. ‘Can they handle cattle?’

  ‘They better,’ replied Mai. ‘They say yours is seventeen. Yours too,’ she added, looking at Suraj.

  He popped his tongue against the inside of his cheek. ‘She’s aged quick. Last week you said she was barely of age.’

  ‘She’s seventeen. No arguments.’

  ‘And yours, brother?’ he asked Jeet.

  Jeet’s mouth twitched. Even as a child, swapping plates so he got the bigger dollops of butter, he could never hide his guilt and would be forced to swap them back. ‘I’m not sure. They said fourteen-fifteen.’

  ‘And you in your twenty-third year. For shame.’

  ‘It’s decided,’ Mai said. ‘The priest, he’s been given the pairings.’

  Suraj gave her a sour smile. ‘Are we to understand that he saw all three and persuaded you to change your mind?’

  ‘You’re getting things mixed up,’ Mai said.

  ‘You don’t even care, do you? That he’s cheating me out of what’s mine. Why would you.’

  She slapped him, hard, though his head barely moved. ‘I said, you’re confused.’

  And he said nothing more, not in the days to come, nor after the wedding, because he supposed she was right: that a wife was a wife, there to bear sons and otherwise live behind her veil, out of his way. Her face was barely worth considering.

  * * *

  *

  Now, he crushes her underneath him, sucking at her breasts and thrusting so insistently the crown of her head jerks closer and closer to the wall. It is an assault. Her face no longer registers in his mind. He feels desire, yes, but it is also about pain and revenge and what he believes to be rightfully his. And, after all, this is no more than such an immodest woman deserves.

  When it is over, he expects her to clutch her clothes to her chest and sprint off in tears, is waiting for it. But she is not crying. She is using both arms to reach behind her back and twist together the tiny metal clasps of her tunic. Astonishingly, she doesn’t seem to be in the slightest hurry. She pulls her long hair over one shoulder, running her fingers through the black screen of it all. He tries to muster up some hatred for this casual woman: there is not even a passing look of shame on her face. How lucky, in fact, that he avoided marrying her. Even the red-lipped courtesans have the grace to appear wounded once he’s finished with them. At this thought the hatred comes swiftly but it is complicated and eclipsed by a twenty-year-old’s sense of wonder. Her smile is so calm, her face so eloquent. She stands, smoothing down the back of her tunic, and lifts both hands to draw her hair away from her face and coil it into a knot at the back of her head. Her arms rest at her sides.

  ‘May I speak?’ she asks.

  ‘No.’

  She frowns, making a funny little
face at him, then palms up her anklets, draws her veil forward and turns to go. Her silk-dark hips oscillate through the gloom. He finds he wants her to stay, a feeling that has as much to do with her body, with both of their bodies, with the playful cast of her face, as it does with the unacknowledged desire he carries inside him to destroy this world. Above the barn, fireflies gather in blooms of yellow. Will he let her simply walk away?

  ‘I want to meet you again.’

  She pauses at the barn entrance, her back to him, and lowering her heel to the ground she turns her head to one side. ‘You mean tonight, my lord?’

  Lord! What a mind. Can fell him with a word. He can feel the need rising in him, as it clearly still does in her. She is so quietly sensual, so serenely ravenous. He wriggles up and off his elbows, sitting cross-legged, suddenly a student before her. A thin layer of dust covers the outside of his bare thighs. ‘I’d love to meet you tonight.’

  ‘You’ll need to tell Mai, then.’

  He smiles. How different she is. ‘Maybe I will,’ he replies, and she steps out of the empty doorway and into the courtyard. The stars, already out, are confusing, and she panics that it is later than she thought and what if the women have returned and witnessed or heard her and her husband? But they are not in the room and some time passes before she hears Harbans asking Gurleen to fetch the widest of the giant trays, the paraats, and to get a shuffle on because all this gourd and saag she has on her head is beginning to make her dizzy. Mehar comes out to lend a hand and together they transfer the green pickings, spreading the velvety leaves and wiping them of any dirt.

  ‘It got dark quickly,’ Gurleen says.

  ‘Hmm,’ yawns Harbans, pausing to drag a tired forearm across her brow. Then: ‘Well, will you look at that.’

  The other two turn. A shimmering column dancing across the roof of the barn.

  ‘Fireflies?’ Gurleen says. ‘What a strange night. Maybe the monsoon is coming early.’

  Mehar is still staring: they look so bright and magical. She wonders if he is still in the barn and thinking of her, as she is of him.

  * * *

  *

  Long after he hears the women repair to their room, Suraj stays in the barn, sitting up against the mud wall. He knows he should clean away the discs of shit around the buffalo, that his brothers will berate him when they return, but all he wants to do is sit here in the kindly dark and think of her. Her huge clever eyes and satin skin. The gentle arcs of her eyebrows. A hand-span waist he could not stop himself from biting until he went lower and looked up and saw her mouth quivering and wet. Her hands had squeezed his back and the electricity of that moment has not left him. Next time, he will not be rough. Was he too rough? No matter. Next time, he will be as gentle as the hollows at the base of her throat. When he hears his mother return, and then his brothers, Suraj takes up his wrap, shakes it free of dirt, and arranges it into a small tight turban. He doesn’t want them to see his hair, which is to say he doesn’t want them to see that he has cut his hair, the first in his family ever to do so. That it now only falls as far as his shoulders. The previous week he’d gone to the Mohammedan barber in the bazaar and handed over a rupee and a warning to keep his mouth shut.

  Suraj rises to his feet and it is this, the mechanics of standing up, that cause the first domino to fall, a chain of synaptic flares deep in the bowl of his brain. Him taking off her top. The smile. Her calm. My lord. Tell Mai. Tell Mai? Before he’s even at the doorway his tread has slowed to a standstill. He reaches for the wall. Forces himself to think. And as his fingers close into a fist, he sees what has happened, and quietly crouches to the ground and puts his face in his hands.

  14

  She won’t say anything. She can’t. Her own obliteration would result. Her head shaved and her naked body paraded through the village on the end of a rope. She would be made into an example. Or, if not that, if Mai decided to show mercy and not throw her out, then at the very least her status in the household would be no more. No more the respected wife of the eldest brother. Everyone’s bhabhi. She would live at the bottom of the pile. Constant insinuations from the sisters-in-law. Sly put-downs from Mai. No right of reply. And, inevitably, the story would leak out to the village and into people’s homes. These things always do. Whenever she ventured into the bazaar for some small thing – a handful of okra, a dozen eggs – it would be there, the opprobrium following her every turn. Not letting her ever rest, not lending her mind any peace at all, but suffocating her, the small village and their small minds tormenting her until she slinks back to the farm and has to face it all again, for ever, until she dies and even then it will become a thing spoken about, a legend passed on, the story of the daughter-in-law who ensnared the brothers of her husband, the courtesan, the Phryne, so that she’d be denied even the solace of death, consigned to bare her teeth and claw the inside of her coffin as she burned in judgement.

  ‘Are you eating your roti or strangling it?’

  Suraj looks down to his food, his grip already loosening. ‘Sorry,’ he says inaudibly. It is evening again, a whole day since he caught her climbing the wall, poking at the patties with her stick.

  ‘Getting dark earlier this month,’ Mai goes on. ‘The moon’s enormous again.’

  ‘Flaunting herself,’ Jeet says, and Suraj pauses with the food at his lips, then he closes his mouth around the roti and chews so slowly he can feel each click of his jaw. Does Jeet know? Has she, in her great innocence, let it all slip through her hands? He allows the thought to bat around his mind as he takes in another mouthful. No one would say a word to him. Not even his brother. Mai would make sure of that. For the sake of the family, for the glory of the family, she’d ensure that the shame rained down on her errant daughter-in-law only. And there is that image again: her in the market while the vendor smirks on. Can I get a night with you as well, sister? Her tears burning as she leaves the coins on the wood-wormed counter and takes the small string bag with its brown eggs.

  ‘Uff, pass it here if you’re just going to stare at it,’ Mai says. ‘A half-decent roti going to waste.’

  ‘Will you help me clear the shit from the barn,’ Jeet asks, and Suraj nods and claps his hands clean. The door to their room opens up ahead and one of the women steps out with a brass pot of water. They must have been watching through the slatted window – she must have been watching – waiting to see when the water should be brought out. It is not her, though, he realises, with a strange relief that also feels like disappointment. No, it is his own wife. She places before him a steel bowl containing a gnarled stump of pale grey soap and when he takes the soap and holds his hands out, she tips the brass pot and pours. He washes restlessly, his hands, his mouth, his beard, snatching at the stiff towel she offers and scrubbing his nails free of turmeric, and then he stands as if he has something urgent he must attend to, looking around, at anywhere but at his wife. Is she watching him from behind the slats still? Are the women the ones who can see everything, while the men stare at black windows? He steps away to the barn, three ravines inscribed across his forehead.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asks Mai.

  ‘To clear the shit,’ he says.

  ‘So why waste soap washing your hands?’

  15

  The sun rises and sets, rises and sets, and in the long intervening hours Suraj keeps himself away: joining friends in the bazaar to marvel sceptically at a new thing called a wireless radio; on his drum near the tannery; dozing in the shade while cattle slurp at the reedy swamp. He leaves home via the barn and crosses the field at a time when he knows she will be out collecting patties, and he doesn’t return until moon-up, once she is safely in her room alongside her sisters. By that time, the gates are locked, so he takes a running jump, heaves himself up on to the sandstone wall and leaps over the stone bath. He stands in the empty courtyard: above him, the stars are bright and stitched into the day’s dark dress. They are so close he c
ould reach up to twist away a sequin and when he does run his palm across the night, the stars travel along his arm. He wonders what lies beyond them. God, he supposes, with his set of brass scales. Suraj doesn’t move when he hears . . . what? Slippers. A cough. Not a minute later: a door. His eldest brother emerges from the room the men share and crosses to the water pump by the barn. He looks small as he works the lever with one hand, drinking from the other, bent over like a nocturnal animal taking its surreptitious chance. He finishes by splashing his face, and when he stands his bony nub of a shoulder jerks up slightly, as if it may be hurting him a little. Suraj feels something like affection, and for half a moment there is equilibrium in this velvet hour, his love for his brother balanced silently and perfectly with his desire for his brother’s wife. A snake side-winds along the sandy wall and as Suraj watches its tail vanish under the metal gate, Jeet starts his move across the courtyard and at once a giant weight crashes through Suraj. All he knows is that he must stop him.

  ‘Brother,’ he says, stepping into the moonlight.

  Jeet doesn’t start and Suraj wonders if for all this time his brother has been alert to his presence. ‘What is it?’

  ‘One of the Bawa boys said they saw a Mussulman at our well earlier. At Murnalipur.’

  Jeet turns, facing Suraj square on. ‘And what did you find there?’ he asks, though the question is inflected with sarcasm. Not for the first time Suraj wonders if his brother hates him on some level, hates him for not having to be the eldest male in the house and for all that comes with it.

  ‘I’ve not been. I thought I’d tell you. Do you think someone’s messing with the irrigation again?’

  ‘Go, can’t you?’