Secret Keeper

by Mitali Perkins

  “Amazing,” Reet said as they followed their grandmother inside and Asha switched on the lamp in the living room. “She really misses him.”

  “I miss him, as well,” Asha said. She wondered how his kind, literary presence would affect the household were he still around. She couldn’t imagine it.

  The girls were switching on the last electric light when Raj and the two daughters-in-law of the house returned, laden with purchases. Raj looked exhausted, hair askew, semicircles of sweat staining his shirt under each arm. He rolled his eyes at Asha and escaped upstairs, muttering something about taking a bath.

  Asha studied the jumble of shopping bags on the floor. “Auntie must have encouraged her to buy everything she set her eyes on,” she said in a low voice to Reet. “Well, at least Ma’s talking again. I wish it were always that easy.”

  Grandmother stormed into the living room and regained control of her galaxy. “Why are you spending so much money, Sumitra?” she demanded. “We must save every penny these days, you know that. We can’t afford excesses like this!” Grandmother’s lectures always rose to a crescendo before descending into a prayer. “Bintu must get his family settled soon! How I wish his father were still alive! Oh, Bhagavan!”

  After invoking God’s name in tears, she left the room, heading for her shrine to place more offerings there for her son’s sake. Before, Asha had always wondered if the other statues of divinities felt neglected because the goddess of wealth got most of Grandmother’s goodies. This time, though, after carrying the ache of her grandfather’s absence, she felt sadness for her grandmother instead of scorn.

  There was an empty silence, but soon Auntie, who had experienced firsthand the Wrath of the Mother-in-Law, tried to bring back Ma’s short-lived animation. She poured her sister-in-law a cup of tea and begged Reet to sing for them. “You sing and dance almost as well as your mother,” she said cleverly.

  But Ma’s fingers were tying and untying the end of her saree into a knot and her face was void again. Reet started to sing, her eyes on Ma, while Auntie accompanied her on the harmonium. Knot. Unknot. Ma’s fingers weren’t keeping the rhythm; her feet weren’t tapping the beat as they did when she wasn’t being held captive.

  Reet’s song was making Auntie sniff over her harmonium. When the music and Reet’s high, sweet voice ended on the same note and the song was over, Auntie wiped away tears with her saree.

  Asha heard the rumble of Uncle’s voice as he deposited groceries in the kitchen and the quick slaps of the cousins’ bare feet on the stairs as they headed to their room.

  Grumbling at the lateness of the hour, Grandmother quickly fried some okra and reheated lentils and rice. Ma went through the motions of serving the family with Auntie, but her face stayed blank; Reet’s song hadn’t made a bit of difference.

  Grandmother, Uncle, Raj, and the little girls ate quickly and left the table. Reet and Asha were almost done when Ma and Auntie sat down to join them. Auntie glanced at her sister-in-law’s drooping figure and gave it one last try. “That woman who cleans the toilets is terrible,” she said. “Should we fire her?”

  “No, no,” Reet said quickly. “You should give her a raise. She’ll work harder then.”

  “Sumitra,” Auntie said. “What do you think we should do? Your husband always told us how you managed your home so well in Delhi.”

  To Asha’s amazement, this odd intervention, too, was temporarily successful. Ma straightened up and pulled her plate closer. “Fire her, of course,” she said. “The toilet in this house smells horrible. My girl in Delhi always kept the bathroom spotless. More money won’t make a bit of difference.”

  Brought back by a smelly toilet, Asha thought. At least until the next blow. She was grateful that Auntie had joined their side for a while in the never-ending battle. She herself still needed a break.

  “Tuni Didi! Come upstairs now! We’re wa-a-a-iting for you!”

  The chorus of voices was persistent, and Asha responded, racing upstairs with a loud roar for the usual bedtime romp.

  EIGHTEEN

  LATE-AFTERNOON SUNLIGHT WAS FLOODING THE ROOF, WARMING Asha’s skin. She drank in the solitude and calm and stretched her legs out, pretending she was one of the lizards basking in the last sunshine. Inside, these tik-tiki darted into dark corners at the first sign of a human being. Up here, though, they didn’t seem to mind her company.

  It was September, and Calcutta was on the brink of cooler harvest days and festivals; the monsoon would be leaving before she did. It was perfect cricket weather; maybe Raj wanted to practice in the garden until it got dark. Where was he, anyway? Probably lying low to avoid another lecture about his poor study habits. Or maybe he was keeping an eye out for that girl who paraded past the house every day, hips swishing under her salwar kameez as though she knew Raj was watching.

  The cousins could use a practice session of cards, too, even though they were getting better at twenty-nine. The other night, Asha and Raj had actually won a round against his parents for the first time. The whole family, including Uncle and Auntie, had cheered loudly—except Ma, who stayed cloistered in her tiny room. Afterward, as Sita and Suma pummeled Asha with pillows and then ran squealing through the house, Asha had felt a strange sensation of timelessness, as though she’d been living in this ancestral home forever. Their time in Delhi, with Kavita, Bishop Academy, and Baba, which had ended months earlier, felt like a dream.

  Asha turned to scrutinize Jay’s house. He’d been missing for three weeks, the shutters of his window closed tightly, and she hadn’t glimpsed him inside or outside the house. She hadn’t gathered the courage to ask anybody about him, either, although she’d been tempted to offer the sweeper who worked for both of their houses a rupee in exchange for information.

  As though the intensity of her desire had summoned him, the window across the way flew open. Jay’s face, haggard and sporting a beard, grinned at her as though he’d just seen her the day before. “Osh!” he called triumphantly. “I’m done!”

  “Shhh. Someone will hear you. Where have you been?”

  “Here. Inside. Painting. And I’m finished.”

  “You’ve been painting all this time? I thought you’d gone somewhere.”

  “I’ve been living down in the servants’ quarters finishing up the portrait. I didn’t want to be distracted, Osh. I knew if you were out here, I’d want to talk to you instead of paint, so I made myself move to the other side of the house.”

  “You could have told me.”

  “I’m sorry, I should have, but I was in the thick of it then. Possessed by the painting. I wasn’t thinking of anything else.”

  “Not even me?” She spoke the words without thinking about how brash they might sound.

  He smiled. “Not even you. I’ve sent it off posthaste to a gallery in Delhi.”

  “What? I didn’t even get a peek, Jay.”

  “How could you, Osh? You’d have had to come over here, and you know that’s impossible.”

  “You could have held it up to the window.”

  “I didn’t want to risk my parents seeing it if I carried it back upstairs. They’d know I’d been painting you, and they wouldn’t be pleased. So I wrapped it in paper and hauled it to the post office. I just got back. The gallery’s been wanting me to send them a portrait for months. They’re going to show it to international art dealers from around the world. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone wanted to display it in one of the galleries I used to visit in Paris when I was studying there?”

  “But it’s of me. Me. I should have seen it, Jay.”

  Jay was flying so high with euphoria that he didn’t notice how upset Asha was.

  “You will, Osh. I’ll take you to Paris when it’s hanging in the Louvre, and we’ll see it together.”

  Her heart thump-thumped. That was more like it; her anger ebbed. “We will?”

  “Definitely.”

  “It’s come!” A shriek rocked the house, and Asha jumped. What was going on? Why wa
s Grandmother shouting like that?

  “Telegram! Sumitra! Bontu! Where are you?”

  “It’s Baba! He must have found a job!” Asha flashed Jay a smile and barreled down the stairs two at a time, stumbling once, catching herself on the banister.

  This was it. Finally. Baba had come through; he was sending for them; they would escape the prison of this house forever. And someday Jay’s fame would bring him to New York, where he would seek her out, she was sure of it. She felt like singing and dancing with joy.

  Reet raced breathlessly into the living room and took Asha’s hand. Grandmother was holding a slip of paper in her hand and a ripped envelope in the other. Ma and Auntie joined them, followed by Raj, Uncle, and the cousins.

  “I can’t make sense of it,” Grandmother said, handing it to Uncle. “It’s in English.”

  “Read it quickly, brother,” Ma said, breaking a youngest-wife-in-the-household rule for the first time and actually ordering her brother-in-law to do something.

  Nobody reacted to her breach of conduct; every eye was riveted on the telegram. Uncle read it silently. Asha watched his face grow as blank as an erased chalkboard. He crumpled the telegram in his fist and still didn’t say word. Suddenly Asha knew; her heart was inside his hand along with that foreign piece of paper.

  “What’s wrong?” Grandmother asked, her voice trembling. “Tell us now, Bontu.”

  “It’s not from him at all,” Uncle said. “It’s from the police department in New York City. He’s—he’s—” He stopped, and his eyes darted from his mother, to his sister-in-law, to his nieces before he managed to say the two words they were by now all dreading: “He’s dead.”

  For the rest of her life, Asha would replay what happened in that room where her father had crawled as a baby, laughed with his brother in his youth, and embraced his mother countless times.

  Grandmother swayed before falling, and Uncle ran to catch her. Reet went to Ma and guided her to the sofa, where they sat down. The little cousins began to cry; Auntie gathered them close. Raj stood apart, his head bowed. Somewhere in the distance a wounded mongoose began to shriek, stung by the cobra it was trying to kill. It took Asha a minute to realize that the high-pitched wail was coming out of her own mouth, and then everything went dark.

  NINETEEN

  ASHA WAS UNDER HER MOSQUITO NET, AND REET’S BODY WAS curled tightly against her back. Each deep, steady breath her sister exhaled stirred the hair on the back of Asha’s skull. Moonlight flooded the room, and rising up on one elbow, she could make out the dim forms of Sita’s and Suma’s bodies on the other side of the bed. Everything seemed normal, but suddenly she realized that she was still wearing the salwar kameez she’d put on the morning before.

  So the telegram hadn’t been the worst nightmare of her life.

  It was real.

  Baba was gone.

  He had died in a train station, jostled by the crowd off the platform and onto the electric rail, dead in seconds after the shock had ravaged his nervous system. That was what Asha thought she remembered, but vaguely, as Uncle had made phone call after phone call trying to gather information. Maybe her sister knew more.

  “Reet, Reet, Reet,” Asha said, shaking her sister and trying not to wake the twins. It didn’t work; Reet didn’t stir.

  Asha lifted the mosquito net and scanned the small table beside the bed. She dimly remembered coming into consciousness, taking three pills, and drinking the glass of water Uncle handed her. Sure enough, a bottle of pills and an empty glass stood there. How many of those had they made her sister swallow? Reet was still in oblivion; the three they’d given Asha hadn’t lasted through the night. How many did you need before you never woke up again, never saw your rumpled salwar kameez, never realized that your father had fallen on an electric rail and was no longer there?

  Had he felt pain? Had the volts of electricity fried his body, brain, bones, blood? Fighting the urge to scream, Asha counted out three pills and swallowed them quickly. Then she tucked herself back into the curve of her sister’s body, put a pillow over her head, and waited for sleep to take her again.

  The Jailor easily seized all three of them. A heavy numbness displaced Asha’s despair the next time she woke. It was so bulky that it didn’t allow her to cry, scream, utter even two words. Both her sister and her mother were equally lifeless, the three of them managing the motions of eating, sitting, sleeping, and bathing in a silent daze.

  I’m suffocating, Asha thought at least thirty times a day, longing to run up to the roof so that she could breathe. But she didn’t. She stayed by her sister’s side, and they flanked their silent mother like statues.

  They could hear Grandmother sobbing in her prayer room, and a pill bottle like the one the girls reached for at night was on their grandmother’s dresser. Only their mother refused Uncle’s gift of medicated oblivion, and soon dark half circles discolored the flesh under her eyes.

  Servants hauled piles of colorful silk and cotton out of Ma’s room, and Ma had to borrow one of Grandmother’s white sarees until she could buy one or two of her own. She could never again wear anything but white, the color of mourning that implied that a widow, too, was dead. Dully, Asha registered Auntie tucking away the most expensive of Ma’s sarees in a trunk. The day after the telegram came, Ma stopped adorning the part in her hair with the stripe of vermilion powder. The unfamiliar exposed quarter-inch line of skin across her mother’s scalp reminded Asha of a scar. Weeping, Grandmother and Auntie led Ma to the pond so she could break her marriage bangles in half and throw them into the water. With her bare wrists and scalp bereft of color, it seemed to Asha that their mother, too, was becoming a ghost.

  “The body?” Ma asked Uncle once. Those were the only two words the girls heard her speak during the required thirteen days before the memorial.

  “His friends will have it burned in New York. One of them is coming in a month or so, and he’ll bring the ashes for you and the girls to give to Mother Ganga. Beta, take this.”

  Raj stared in confusion at the razor his father was holding. “But, Baba, I already have one.”

  Uncle sighed. “You’ll have to shave your head. For your uncle’s memorial.”

  Asha stood up immediately. “I’ll do it,” she said, taking the razor from her cousin’s hand. “He’s my baba.”

  “You can’t shave your head, Tuni,” Uncle said, and his voice was so gentle that for the first time it sounded exactly like Baba’s. “Only a son can make that sacrifice. Without a son, a nephew must take the duty.”

  Asha nodded, too drained of strength to protest. Besides, a simple shaving of the head didn’t come close to demonstrating the overwhelming grief she was carrying inside.

  TWENTY

  JAY CAME TO THE MEMORIAL SERVICE WITH HIS PARENTS, clean-shaven and dressed in a formal kurta and pajama, like all the other men who attended. Asha didn’t look his way, but as he passed her in the dark hallway he glanced quickly around, reached for her hand, and squeezed it, hard. It was the first time they’d touched, and he let go quickly as the hall filled up with other visitors. Tears filled Asha’s eyes for the first time since the telegram, but she blinked them back quickly. Reet was the only one who noticed Jay’s gesture, and apart from a quick intake of breath, she didn’t say anything.

  The rest of the day was a blur to Asha. She stayed close to her sister and blocked out Grandmother’s wailing and crying, the scores of proverbs and platitudes offered by neighbors and relatives, and the priest’s intoned prayers for Baba’s incarnation into the next life. Reet and Ma were managing the correct social motions, too, greeting visitors, nodding, pretending to listen, but Asha could tell they were in the grip of the same terrible numbness. So this is the power that captures Ma, she thought. No wonder it takes so much to free her.

  That night, she stopped taking the medication. Once her sister was asleep, palm to palm with both hands between cheek and pillow as usual, Asha forced herself to picture Baba’s face. The image that came first wa
s one of his cheeks crinkling in laughter after he told a funny story; the girls always teased him about laughing more than his listeners at his own jokes. The salty tears came silently at first; then Asha released deep, rending sobs into her pillow while Reet slept on. After hours of crying, sleep finally came, but it wasn’t deep, and Asha woke again to fresh tears.

  Every moment she could, she scribbled memories of Baba in her diary. Jokes he’d told, advice he’d given, times just the two of them had sipped tea and talked about tennis. Asha made herself remember, chiseling away at the numbness bit by bit. It was the most difficult thing she’d ever done, allowing herself to suffer a pain she could barely tolerate. The days were easier because her diary absorbed some of it. Nights were rough; four times she failed, groping in the dark for the nightstand, finding and taking the pills.

  But the Jailor was reluctantly loosening his grip on her, and she kept at it. The only thing she chased from her mind was imagining Baba’s last minutes of life. What good would it do to try to travel where her own memory couldn’t take her?

  Baba’s last postcard arrived the day after the memorial. Asha saw it on the veranda where the postman had left the mail, grabbed it, and raced with it up to the roof. She wanted to read it alone, so for once she was glad there was no sign of Jay.

  The picture was of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and Baba’s message was brief:

  Dear Shona and Tuni,

  I can’t wait to see your sweet faces again; I miss you and love you more than life itself. Remember the promises you made, my beloved daughters. Take care of each other and your ma. Soon I’ll send for you, very soon.

  As ever, I remain

  your loving Baba