by Veena Rao
“Don’t be silly, Tara. I sent Nina to invite you.”
“Why didn’t you come?”
“Don’t I know you, Tara? As hot-headed and as stubborn as your father. I knew Nina had a better chance of bringing you back home.”
“Aunty Nanda was so mean to me the day I arrived, and you did nothing but cry.”
“I cried thinking that you would face such talk from everyone.”
“I am ready to confront loose talkers, Amma. I have Mangala Devi’s trident inside me.”
Amma stretched her arms out for a hug. “Me too, darling. One thing I’ve realized is that if I am strong, it will be easier for all of us to face people.”
Tara stooped into Amma’s arms, soaking in their warmth. For the first time since she was eight, she felt no anger, no hurt—only a keen awareness that her parents and brother were shifting to her side of the battle; that something had shifted inside of her too.
The lehenga fit her perfectly. She did her own makeup—foundation, compact, an extra coat of mascara, eyeliner, bright lipstick—not caring to get in the long queue of young women who waited for the hired beautician to first finish the bride’s face and hair. She let her hair loose in its natural texture—curly, bouncy, unfettered—and carried a blue velvet embroidered potli purse, a gift from Nina, its short slings hanging from her forearm. In the purse was Nina’s cell phone, which Cyrus had said he would call. Happily, for Tara, Nina had insisted that she carry it. Hearing his voice, telling him how much she loved him would complete her day. She felt bright and sparkly—like the lehenga she was wearing.
She occupied a chair up front, facing the elevated platform where the bride was seated on a flower-decked swing. Nina glowed, resplendent in a Nalli silk peacock blue-and-fuchsia Kanjeevaram sari. A henna artist sat on a red plastic chair beside Nina, decorating her hands, arms, and feet with intricate patterns. Young members of the extended Raj family took turns on the raised platform, performing dance numbers set to popular Bollywood songs. Every once in a while, a younger relative dropped by to ask Tara about college or job prospects in America. A few whispered that they had read her article and were proud of her. She couldn’t tell what the older majority, the keepers of tradition, were thinking because not one person actually told her she was an outcast. She ignored groups that whispered, that turned conspicuously to look at her, the occasional snigger that reached her ears. Ultimately, her memories of the evening would be crafted from her perception of it. She felt peaceful, perhaps because she was on a mission, perhaps because her family had finally rallied a protective boundary around her, perhaps because she had discovered so much about herself in the past few days.
Amma commanded the henna artist, who had moved her station to a less conspicuous spot in the garden, to craft delicate floral motifs on Tara’s hands and arms right after the bride’s. As first cousin, that was the rightful order. On a whim, Tara asked the artist, a twenty-something woman with a sweet manner, to pipe Breaking Taboos across her right palm between floral patterns, a reminder of the importance of taking stances, of courage.
Daddy had a smiling face when he took the empty chair next to hers, when he put a reassuring arm around her.
“Our Rotary Club president called a while ago. He wants you to speak on women’s empowerment at the anniversary celebrations of Mahila Sevashrama in Talpady next week. It is a center for abandoned women that our club supports.”
Tara absorbed the news, the significance of it. Her article had made some positive impact. She had never addressed a crowd before, not made a speech even in front of a mirror. Yet she was filled more with an adrenaline rush than with dread, like a child waiting in line for a thrill ride at Disney. She looked at the two words drying on her right palm, blazing orange stains forming under the drying mud-green henna.
“I’ll do it, Daddy,” she said. She would worry later about addressing a crowd, making her voice heard, keeping her knees from buckling with fright.
“Can you believe that our local member of the state legislature, whom we invited as chief guest, suggested your name as speaker to our club president? He read your article on his flight home from Bangalore.”
“Was it in the Bangalore edition, too?”
Daddy nodded. There was no mistaking the pride in his eyes when he said, “Who knew my daughter would one day be invited to give speeches on women’s empowerment?”
Later, Vijay occupied the chair vacated by Daddy, raising his hand to high-five her. He had heard the news of the Rotary invite from Daddy. She held her hands up, apology on her face, to indicate that the henna was still not completely dry.
“You will now have huge expectations to live by. I am happy to be let off the hook,” he joked.
Tara understood what he meant. In high school, Vijay had grumbled about the high expectations Daddy and Amma had of him, the pressure to excel in everything he did—debate, cricket, school tests, the board exams.
“Why is Tara let off so easy?” he had yelled at Daddy once, after being admonished for letting his math grades slip.
“I envied you my whole life for being the golden son; the one they were proud of,” she said now. “I was left behind so I could become an engineer or doctor, and I became neither.”
“That was not right, leaving you behind. At least not after Mom and Dad learned about Uncle Anand’s psychosis.” Vijay shook his head. “Amma and I should have stayed back at Shanti Nilaya.”
“On the bright side, being isolated in a room with books made me a writer,” she said, and laughed.
They watched for a while in silence, a six-year-old relative’s Bharata Natyam dance performance on stage; an older sister hovering beside the little girl, prompting the footwork, the hand gestures, the facial expressions. The moment seemed right for Tara to reveal her innards, get a lifelong guilt off her chest. “Remember the time Daddy took us to Summer Sands resort when you visited the first time in 1979?” She told him about the sandcastle they had built by the blue waters of the Arabian Sea.
“I remember. That is probably my earliest memory of the sea,” Vijay said.
“I was horrible to you that day.”
“You were horrible to me?”
She nodded. “I pushed your face into the sandcastle and held it down until you gasped for breath.”
“Why?”
“I was furious when you said I couldn’t live with you all because I was a dragon, that I had to be locked away. I was really locked up in Daddy’s room, you know, because of Uncle Anand’s violent episodes. It hurt, also, because I didn’t get to go to Dubai.”
Vijay frowned into the grass, blinking, as if trying to recollect a faded memory.
“I am sorry Vijay. I truly am. I wish I had been a better big sister to you,” she said.
“It’s funny, but that is not how I remember the incident,” Vijay’s gaze moved back to her face. “I remember you shooing the stranger away, wiping the sand off my face, hugging me. I remember being glad that I had a big sister to protect me.”
He put his arm around her, and his voice was unexpectedly mellow when he said, “I like my version of the story better.”
A lump formed in her throat. She was glad that they’d had this conversation, glad her brother had allowed her a peek at his softer side. There was a tender edge to her voice when she said, “Thank you, Brother.”
The dinner buffet opened. Tara and Vijay got into the long line and filled their plates up with spicy fried black pomfret, fragrant mutton biryani, chicken in golden gravy, soft akki rotti, and an assortment of vegetables. They found seats by the potted marigolds, away from the crowd. After tucking into a whole fish fried in coconut oil and glugging half a bottle of Kingfisher beer, his eyes a bit glazed, Vijay told Tara about his broken heart.
Uma, his live-in girlfriend of six months, had broken up with him two days prior to Tara’s last call inviting him to her wedding. They had met at a bar. She was a human rights lawyer by profession and a strong-willed nonconformist. He was plann
ing to propose to her when he had learned, through common friends, of her affair with his friend Jay. He had confronted her. She had called him a closed-minded, chauvinistic jerk, which was why she was drawn to his liberal friend. She had ended it with Vijay, leaving him to wonder why he had insisted on a quality certificate for the twenty-two-carat solitaire engagement ring he had picked up at an Indian jewelry store in Artesia.
“I was hurting and angry when you called.” He cupped a hand to his mouth to calm a burp. “So, I reacted like the closed-minded, chauvinistic bugger that I was.”
She told him it was all right. What was important was that he had changed. She felt special for being trusted with news that could never reach her parents’ ears. A live-in girlfriend was taboo. She was surprised that he had fallen in love with a nontraditional woman, that he had broken the rules too.
“I hope you are over her?” she asked.
Vijay’s nod was feeble.
“You deserve better, Vijay. She ought to have ended it with you first.”
Her reaction was from the heart, from the ache she felt knowing that her brother was still hurting. She understood that it was the same for him, for Daddy, and for Amma. The need to defend her was a force of love that had finally won over their belief systems.
It was a long evening. Around ten o’clock, she rubbed the dry henna off her hands, knowing that the longer she kept her hands unwashed, the more intense the stain; the more intense the stain, the stronger her husband’s love for her. That was the belief. But she couldn’t risk missing Cyrus’s call. She eagerly pulled Nina’s cell phone from her potli purse and held it in her hand. She waited for the inanimate object to come to life. It did not.
Her earlier enthusiasm of the evening left her. She felt drained and sleepy. She walked into the living room, where Aunty Nanda’s father-in-law had dozed off on the chair beside the side table where the landline sat, beside a bronze statue of the laughing Buddha. She woke him up with a gentle tap to his forearm.
“Grandfather.”
He opened his eyes and smiled a benign smile, making smacking noises with his lips.
“Did you take any calls tonight?”
“The Christian chap called several times, but not tonight.”
“My husband called? When?”
“When you were hiding in your grandfather’s house.”
“Are you sure he did not call tonight?”
“The phone did not ring at all. I’ve been here all evening. Nobody cares for an old man.”
Tara turned to leave, disappointment rising from her chest.
“I told him the last time he called,” the elderly man’s voice carried clearly across the room. “It was a brilliant move, marrying a Hindu girl to increase his tribe.”
Indignation welled inside her, but she let it out with a long, cleansing breath and turned around to face him.
“Have you had dinner, grandfather? Can I get you something? Or would you like to sit outside for a while?”
“Laddoos. Get me some laddoos,” he said with a smile.
Chapter 30
She dozed off on the sofa from the exhaustion of the evening, and from trying Cyrus’s number every thirty minutes. Each time, it was his crisp recorded voice after just a ring, telling her to leave a message. It was likely that Cyrus had turned his phone off. But why? She had tried Alyona’s number and got her voicemail too. Ruth had picked up, but told her that she and Dottie were in Savannah with the church group. They would check on Cyrus when they returned the next day.
When she woke up with a start, the sun was only just rising, and in the blue-gray darkness of dawn, the living room looked like it was littered with bodies. Then she heard the peaceful snoring of the sleeping guests. They were lying on thin mattresses and covered in thin handloom blankets, the men on one side, the women adjacent to them.
She tiptoed out of the living room and locked herself in the bathroom on the main floor. She was awake enough to feel restless. She had time to think as she finished her business, as she brushed her teeth by smearing toothpaste on her finger and washed her face with bar soap and water. She was still dressed in her fancy velvet lehenga, which was better than heading across the city in pajamas. She slithered back into the kitchen, looked for the ceramic jar where Amma kept small cash to pay the vegetable and fish vendors. There was no ceramic jar; but she got lucky. The cash was hidden in a black cast-iron kettle that did not belong on the top shelf. She took out a fistful of rupees, enough to engage a rickshaw to Dadda’s house.
The rickshaw puttered down the lane, the driver not fully awake. The four Saldanha homes stretched down on one side like a string of pearls, the other side just a high wall of laterite bricks and cement. The homes were all architecturally similar: large traditional Mangalorean homes with red tiled roofs and sprawling green yards from which mushroomed tall, swaying coconut palms. They had all survived the building frenzy in the town.
Tara shivered in her heavy velvet ensemble, even though it was a barely cool morning. How strange, she thought, that she had not once been to her husband’s home, had never seen the room where he grew up, the bed he slept in. The vortex in her chest expanded as the rickshaw stopped at the high double iron gates of Dadda’s pristine white villa.
Dadda met Tara warmly in the portico. He was an early riser, he told her. Cyrus had told him she was here for a cousin’s wedding when he had called a few days ago, but he had not expected to see her in wedding clothes at six in the morning.
He seated her in the inner sitting room. The shock came to her in waves, the historic nature of the moment. She had not expected to be here without Cyrus. The room appeared untouched by modernity. Grand arched wooden windows draped in lace curtains stood majestically against ochre walls. German tiles covered the floor; the low wooden beams of the ceiling reflected preserved heritage. A grand piano sat in a corner, its top covered in lace, surrounded with polished teakwood furniture topped with dark red upholstery. Tara ran her fingers over the soft fabric of the settee. She imagined a little boy with twinkling honey eyes weaving through the furniture in the room. She pictured him running out into the passageway that led to rooms beyond, into the mystery.
“How did the fundraiser go?” Dadda asked.
She bowed her head, guilt warming her cheeks.
“I’ve been trying to reach Cyrus. I was hoping you had heard from him about the fundraiser.” Her words were a rush of anxiety and guilt. Dadda’s eyebrows furrowed behind his steel-rimmed glasses. She immediately regretted passing on her unease to him. He reached over to the black antique landline phone that rested on a polished teakwood side table. She knew from his expression that he had reached the voicemail, even before he spoke to the recorder.
“Cyrus, this is Dadda. Please call me when you get this message. Tara is here and would like to speak to you.”
“Maybe he decided to spend a week at the meditation center in North Carolina,” she joked, forcing a bright smile to her face. “How are the children doing? I’d like to visit them soon.”
“I’ll take you any time you want. They are all anxious to meet you.”
Dadda told her she was welcome to stay. The villa was as much hers as it was Cyrus’s. She said she would return with her luggage soon.
He showed her the house. They walked along the passage, peeked into several large rooms with antique furniture. They reached the heart of Cyrus’s childhood, his bedroom. Solid evidences of his life swam into her view. A teakwood dresser stood against one wall, a cupboard and a desk against the other. Above the desk, close to the entrance to the room, hung a prayer printed in papyrus font on handmade beige paper that was shaped like a medieval scroll. It was the prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi.
She crossed her hands across her chest to stop from shivering as she walked deeper into the room, past his four-poster bed covered in a beige embroidered bedspread. She felt his presence, the years he had spent in this room; growing up, learning new things, gaining new experiences, adding layers to
his personality.
Back in the sitting room, she waited with Dadda, tormented by the silence of the phone. She felt silly, doing nothing to lift the burden off her chest. A middle-aged maid in a floral knee-length dress brought in tea on a wooden tray. Tara took a few sips from the dainty china cup, then mumbled about having to run errands.
“I’ll be back soon, Dadda,” she promised, giving him a quick hug.
“Don’t worry, my dear. Cyrus is not an irresponsible lad. He will call,” Dadda reassured her.
She walked down the street that led to Morgan Hill, where Cyrus had once walked with her all those years ago. Where he had said good-bye.
She stopped at the little Hanuman shrine at the top of Morgan Hill to ring the bell. For most of her life, her mind had associated temple chimes with loss, with sorrow. Yet, her feet had instinctively led her to the shrine, and her hand had reached up to the slim brass bell that hung from a thick rope. She stood a few seconds looking at the monkey god, painted green, the symbol of strength and perseverance. She was a believer, she knew. She had always been. Even when her prayers hadn’t manifested. Even when her conscious, skeptical mind told her she wasn’t. Even though she hadn’t put her hands together in prayer for most of her life.
The whole of the universe is inside you. To rule yourself is to rule the world. Uncle Anand had been right, as he often was. She joined her hands together now and closed her eyes. A simple acknowledgement of the higher consciousness inside her; a deep love that connected her with her universe. A simple effort to keep her hope strong—stronger than her fears.
The spare key to Shanti Nilaya, which Gangamma often used, was under a laterite brick on which sat a nondescript neem pot in the front yard. Once in, she headed to the new bathroom for a long bath, filling a large bucket with hot water from the geyser, then pouring water over herself out of a plastic mug—a calming ritual from her childhood. She had until nine before businesses would open. Her plan was to go to the currency exchange in Balmatta and get enough rupees to buy her a ticket back to Atlanta.
