Their physicality with each other was effortless. They didn’t go so far as to lie down. She did not tuck his hair behind his ear with her thin fingers. Instead, they leaned into books together and touched shoulders. Parvati continued not to feel sexual about him, but she also knew that he was handsome and that, underneath his carefully beautiful presentation, there was a sensual person who knew how to give pleasure.
She spotted him on campus with a younger woman—one of the very women who had subjected her to taunt after taunt. The woman, Prabha, was growing prettier, a stack of books pressed against her breasts like a loved child. Unlike Parvati, she touched his hair, her sari lifting to reveal the smooth beckon of her bare stomach. Finally, Parvati felt a surge of attraction, but toward this woman. Afterward, when she studied with Jaideep, Parvati could smell the change in his body. His overall behavior didn’t change with Parvati in any meaningful way, but she found it hard to keep her calm with him. Something about the way he was with Prabha smacked of brutishness, and it reinforced Parvati’s own confusion about Prabha’s beauty while making her feel jealous of both of them.
“You saw that I am with Prabha, didn’t you?” he asked, looking at her intensely in his office, the way that he looked at her writing.
Parvati felt how exaggerated her shrug was. “Yes. She is very pretty.”
“You do not seem very happy about this.”
“You are very perceptive,” she said. They both heard the electric crackle of her tone, and they started giggling. Soon, they were crying against the table, their shoulders shaking against the wood. They were aware more than ever that their great emotional connection was with each other, not with other people. It was a connection of mind-set and demeanor, which seemed more important than one of the body.
They decided that they couldn’t explore their lives outside of the college without each other, a wedding of friendship. They got married in her village. Her parents watched, still and wordless, but they prepared what was, for them, a sumptuous feast of paneer and roti. Only the four of them were there to eat it. (Although she was not the child of a diplomat, he was, and his parents were in China.) They both got better jobs teaching at Allahabad University, and they lived in an apartment that was hardly bigger than Jaideep’s first office had been.
Toward the end of Parvati’s dissertation—she was such a fast study that she ended up finishing hers a month before Jaideep finished his—she told him how she had coveted Prabha’s curves while still finding Prabha’s personality distasteful. Meanwhile, she expected Jaideep to reveal his own desire for men, but he said nothing. Instead, he taught her the word meaning “lesbian.” Still, she suspected that there were students of his—eager, expectant—with whom he had occasional dalliances. She did not have a problem with this. Her problem was fulfilling her own desire.
When they eventually had sex, hoping for a child, there was something endearing in having his hair hang into her face like an air-swayed tree. When she became pregnant, she felt her body become something out of the fairy tales that she had studied. Her stomach grew away from her as if striving for a journey. She soldiered into the changes, glad that her body was finally accomplishing something. “Dreams,” or “nightmares,” would not have been accurate to describe the episodes she had at night. She thought of them as “winds”: a wind of the child emerging as a tiger; a wind of its legs pedaling the air; a wind of leaving it in the field behind her parents’ house; a wind of the baby looking exactly like her, a grown woman, so she could study her body’s angles. She had grown up touching herself and not knowing what it meant, but now she knew what it meant: she loved her body. This was a solution. She didn’t need to look outside of herself for ways to fulfill her desire. This baby, what it was doing to her body, was an answer.
She had known a girl named Swati at school who had been part of the teasing throng, so Parvati named her daughter Swati because she wanted to transform the story: she would raise a girl who would not stand aside as others attacked.
She was thrilled when Swati emerged—not a tiger, nor a foundling, nor a mirror of Parvati but a bustling, happy baby.
Swati would not be normal because both of her parents were abnormal. Parvati became obsessed by this; the ecstasy of her pregnancy had given way to the fever of motherhood. She could not situate herself in the fairy tale now: was she the kind mother who saw the kids off to the forest path or the witch who trapped them on it? Within the next year or two, before Harit was born, she realized that not only would she quit her teaching but that she would erase all memory of it. She was terrified that if Swati read her academic writings about fairy tales, Swati would be daunted and fail to cultivate her own personality. Surprisingly, Jaideep did not discourage this. He welcomed it, supporting Parvati and releasing her from her academic studies as easily as he had once engaged her in debate.
As Swati grew, Parvati feared once again that something horrible would befall her daughter. She kept these thoughts private, sewing her terror inside herself. Every crawl of Swati’s, every amble, every cheery dance and discovery was an opportunity for Parvati to envision horrible things—a broken arm, a severed foot, a sickeningly thrilling moment in which Swati was consumed in flames until she was nothing but a smoking heap of cooling cinders. Parvati could not share such things with Jaideep, and something between them began to harden. But no matter. Once Harit arrived, she managed to hide her frenzy; in its place was a smooth, even hardness that she was convinced would make her a better parent. Each night, instead of coddling her children, she would lie straight in her bed, which sat next to Jaideep’s, and think of how dearly she loved Swati. Harit she loved, but it was her first child, whom she saw as the continuation of her willful youth, that she saw as the effort of her sacrifice. She had vanished her earlier life so that Swati could thrive.
Swati would not know about the small village and the mountains and the field, its rolling sameness, and the snooty professor and the quick leap that Parvati had taken to the higher edges of study, the man with the ponytail and his commanding sensuality. She would not know about what her mother had done to make her life richer, and this would increase Swati’s sense of isolation as she grew up.
It was not until Swati was gone that Parvati realized her folly: in trying to allow her daughter the space to become extraordinary, she had given her an entirely ordinary mother. She could not have expected that she would be the one to remain. Her parents had named her after change, but she could not have expected that cruelest of all changes, death.
Now she had Harit. Harit, who had always been quiet, who, if he was curious about the world, never told her as much. If she had sewn her grief into herself before, it now grew and filled her up, and she found it impossible to pull herself up and speak to him; a paralysis of sorts had set in. Harit, dear Harit, whom she had named after the color green because that is what she remembered of her field. She heard him coming home late, stumbling, the snacks she could hear him making—flour dumped into a pan of oil, wrappers split open to spill out a clatter of candies or chips. She suspected that he had picked up something of his father, a bend in the wrist and a sway to his walk, and when he first began that startling game of dressing up for her, she could not muster the strength to speak to him, playing along to satisfy the urges that he clearly needed to engage. If he would only come to her with a direct explanation of his feelings, she could explain herself, tell him the many things that she had withheld from him and Swati and even Jaideep, tell him that she had visited the doctor, with Gital, and found that cataracts were not that detrimental and could be treated, that “macular degeneration” was the ailment to truly fear—that she could still see relatively well. But unless he came to her as himself instead of in a disguise, she could not make the effort to speak with him. Her grief needed an equal force to shock it out of its cage.
Meanwhile, Gital had insinuated herself into their home, and Parvati was well aware that Gital had become obsessed with her. One quiet night, Gital lowered herself before Pa
rvati’s chair and kissed her cheeks, then her mouth, and a few days later, Parvati lay with her on the couch, Gital touching Parvati’s lips with her own soft, lightly wrinkled lips. Gital twisted herself along Parvati’s length until she gave a tough but meaningful cry. Parvati then did the same with Gital, though no cry escaped her. No cry would escape her. She had given herself up to create something extraordinary, and then that extraordinary thing had died, and she could not muster up more strength after having mourned so thoroughly.
So, she waited.
RANJANA DIDN’T KNOW WHAT SHE was doing with Achyut. She had never behaved like this, her comportment with strangers a longtime matter of tiptoeing and averting her gaze, often from her own image. Interacting with strangers was very much like being a bride: just because it was an occasion for something out of the ordinary didn’t mean that it was a time for self-indulgence. There was a larger purpose to it, which was to endure.
Take, for instance, the process of immigration years ago: flying all the way from India to Frankfurt to New York. Mohan’s arm wrapped around her back, not her waist, protecting her but moving her along. The weather cold, as she had expected for the winter, but so much rain, a type of rain that she had never felt, which seeped into her sari and coat and deepened their already dark colors. It all felt like an extension of the wedding itself, and Ranjana kept her head down and her center knotted up. She simply had to tolerate getting from one end of the world to the other without losing the unmistakable, ephemeral foundation of her status-as-bride. When they finally arrived at their family friends’ house in Edison, New Jersey, Ranjana had to use three towels to dry herself off, including one of the enormous beach variety. Naked in a cramped child’s bedroom, she caught her reflection in a long mirror, stickers clustered at its bottom. The abbreviated wings of her shoulders, her breasts small, as if hung on her frame with a sling, the slim columns of her legs intersecting in a dark cloud. The mehndi on her hands and feet had lost none of its scarlet polish. There you had it: she had made it to America. She was a wife, if her hands and feet were any indication. As she pulled on a nightgown that her host had given her, a fluffy white bag with small, pink ribbons festooning its front, she could feel Mohan’s arm still fastened around her.
After they moved to the Cleveland area, where Mohan had gotten a job at Case Western, and slowly negotiated their way into an American life, Ranjana learned to reemphasize her shyness when dealing with her white counterparts. Mohan did all of the talking anyway, moving them into their campus housing with little fanfare, everything as he had envisioned it, he claimed. Ranjana became obsessed with the number of reflective surfaces in their home: the toaster, the microwave, even the pearly block of their refrigerator. The bathroom mirror, sectioned trifold in its vanity, the silver disc of a mirror affixed to the shower’s tile so that Mohan could see himself shaving. One room, where Ranjana kept her sewing machine and Mohan kept his books, even had a wall covered entirely with mirrors. A mural of a flock of geese, in a yellow-brown hue, was spackled across it, although Ranjana could still catch slivers of her face and her limbs around it. She had never been vain—and she wasn’t now, either—but the prevalence of mirrors gave her the chance to examine her appearance. Perhaps she was not as unimpressive as she had always assumed; the only mirror on which she had relied all her life was the collective reflection of her family’s gaze. She had one sister and one brother, both older, both now in California, and they had borne the dark eyes and long faces and shiny smiles of her parents. She had dark eyes, but set too widely apart, and her face followed suit, broad and uneven. A smile could not thrive under these circumstances, especially not under the unruly mantle of her hair. All of these deficiencies had been pointed out by the suite of aunties who had taken up roost in her childhood home. They had pecked at her hair and eyebrows, pinched the vulnerable skin at her hips, taken her face in their hands and turned it side to side. Successful in their examinations, they had built Ranjana’s self-criticism step by step.
Since they were absent from Ranjana’s new American life, she sought the unbiased approval of this mirror-flecked apartment, hopeful yet aware of her naïveté. She did not make a grand discovery; she was every bit as unimpressive as they had indicated. Free of the tribunal of aunties, she began to take grim pleasure in seeing her homeliness anew. Mohan found her one afternoon as she stared at one of her eyes in a teaspoon, holding it to her face as if looking through a monocle. She brought it to the table in a quick thud. She sensed his assessment of her across the table as if it were an aroma; he dipped a dry biscuit into his tea. He must have found her vulnerability much more flavorful than his snack, and he voiced as much to her later in bed.
“I go through all of those papers in that tiny office all day, and I know that I am grading these idiots’ homework so that I can come take care of you.” Her back was turned to him, the warm silhouette of his body aligned with hers. Through her nightgown, she could feel his arousal and wondered how dissatisfied he would be with the whimpering carnal assembly that she had examined in that mirror. Mohan breathed into her ear, his breath hot, but he fell asleep before she could be expected to do anything. She watched the numbers on the digital clock of their bedside table as they rearranged themselves in glowing red stick figures. If she strained hard enough in the dark, she could make out her reflection in the face of the clock, lined in spare moonlight, the snoring mountain of Mohan’s body behind her.
* * *
If Mohan hadn’t been so lax in observing his wife, if he hadn’t settled into his comfortable routine, if he hadn’t mistaken the increasing richness of her food as the sign of a spouse’s affection, if he hadn’t been so busy watching stories about agriculture and cinema on his TV, if he hadn’t spent more time scratching partial credit onto his students’ papers than he spent focusing his gaze on his wife’s nervous tics, if he hadn’t been, in a word, happy with the way his life flicked from day to day, then perhaps he would have seen his wife transforming. He would have noticed how she spent her free money and time not just on getting her eyebrows waxed, as Indian women had to do, but also on getting her nails done in a nice salon, a task that most Indian women accomplished in the perfumed station of their master bathrooms. Maybe he would have noticed how his wife always seemed to work latest on the nights when he played tennis; maybe he would have noticed how she got up early to make atta and masala instead of preparing them the night before. Same went for packing his lunch. When he got ready in the morning, Mohan would find Ranjana sitting in front of the TV with her cup of tea, her hair newly washed, and all of her chores already done for the day.
This change occurred over the course of a month. It could not have been more concentrated in its ascent. But Mohan didn’t notice such things. If anything, he just assumed that Ranjana had finally put aside the little death that had been Prashant’s departure. Now she could behave like herself again. Now he could have the wife he had known when they first came here, one who had no friends and no job and only her husband to eat her food with approval. Perhaps he could cradle her body in bed again.
To be sure, the more that Ranjana recalled their early years in America, the more she saw that Mohan’s ideal situation was one of monotony, the status quo when they’d first arrived here. Everything was just as he had envisioned it. She had always assumed that he meant that he had prepared himself for the logistical feat of their immigration, sight by sight, signed paper after signed paper. Now she understood. He had envisioned his ideal American life ahead of time and would see to its realization as best he could: mainly sedentary, comfortable with the objects that built its ordinariness—stainless steel dishes of fennel seeds and spices, salt and pepper shakers, oven mitts burned at the tip from handling one hot dish after another. An American life that was as reliable, present, and reinforcing as his recliner. And there in his recliner he sat as Ranjana crafted their meals over the heat of the stove. And felt, by virtue of her after-work Paradise Island forays with Achyut, as lucky and incipient as Prash
ant, off on the adventure of his college life. She had heard about second acts in life but had never believed in them. Although it was not like Achyut was already a best friend or, certainly not, a lover, it was an exquisite surprise to Ranjana, the idea of youth’s desire to engage her, and youth’s being entertained in turn.
It felt altogether uncharted to her, for example, to find out if she had a sense of humor. She didn’t know if she could be funny; she had never been given the opportunity, not even with her child, who did not seem particularly adept at such things himself. As much as it terrified her to find out that she might have neither wit nor guile, the simple act of exploring this was thrilling. If Mohan hadn’t been so rigidly methodical, then perhaps he would have laughed at a joke, just one, and precluded all of this from happening.
* * *
It was like one of the stories her cohorts in writing class would have crafted: Mohan going away on a business trip and leaving Ranjana by herself. He had a lecture to give in Minneapolis, a town where they had a few Indian friends who were more than happy to take him in. It was out of the question for Ranjana to accompany him, as the university would pay only for Mohan’s travel.
So on a Thursday evening, Mohan drove them to the airport, relinquishing the wheel only when he was properly in possession of his suitcase, his carry-on bag, a crooked fedora, and a light jacket. He waved good-bye to Ranjana while giving a quick admonition about keeping the car in good condition.
As she drove away, moving through the red and white cascade of lights clogging the airport roadways, she felt as if she had, until now, been covered in feathers and was finally molting off their fluffy weight. Dropping Prashant off at college had been heartbreaking because, in reducing her household to just herself and Mohan again, it had represented an entrenchment of her wifely duties. Prashant had hugged her, put his lips to her ear and whispered, “Good luck.” This was not meant as a general well-wishing but as a sympathetic gesture. Prashant and Mohan, like any Indian father-son duo, had engaged in many spiteful fights over the years—Mohan’s exactitude clashing with Prashant’s passivity—and Prashant knew that he was leaving his mother with a more potent version of the behavior he had found so maddening. Ranjana now understood Prashant’s relief fully because it was exactly what she felt in this moment. She wanted to go home, brew a pot of tea, put on some old Anup Jalota bhajans, and sit at her computer.
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