Someone has stolen the princess! It is a demon, a monster, who stole her away, who flew Sita up over the mountains, across the sea, to the barbaric island of Lanka. The prince was away, hunting; the prince was not paying proper attention. And no one knows what Lakshman was doing; he has served his purpose, his part in the story is done. But now Rama gathers a great army, and it is the monkey king who leads them, through the dark forests, over the churning sea.
The princess waits in a tall tower, resisting the demon’s advances. Sita wants to be a good wife; if the demon comes too close, she threatens to throw herself off the edge, down onto the sharp rocks. She has never been in a tower so high, and secretly, she wants to jump, to feel the wind rushing again as it did when the demon snatched her. His glossy obsidian claws came down around her, caging her in, sweeping her through the air, her crimson sari trailing like a banner behind them. Nothing in her life has been as exciting as that flight. But Sita does her duty, she clings to the crumbling stone of the ancient tower, she teeters over the edge but does not, in fact, fall.
SHANTHI KNOWS SHE SHOULD GO STRAIGHT HOME. THE GIRLS WILL be fed by now, but they will still be raucous, full of energy. Leilani will be running up and down the stairs, Harini and Kili will undoubtedly be fighting, over dolls, or clothes, or makeup they aren’t yet allowed to wear. Mayil will be drawing in her sketchbook; Shanthi thanks God every day for giving her one quiet child, and tries not to worry that all the girl seems to want to draw are human skeletons. Neriya won’t have eaten enough, and Aravindan will be coaxing her to eat a little more, and Lakshmi—Lakshmi will be sitting on the floor, sucking her thumb. Shanthi knows exactly what it will be like, and so she turns east instead of west, heading along the Midway to the lake, heedless of the cold that bites her nose, her cheeks.
She kicks her way along snowy sidewalks until the hem of her sari is drenched. Aravindan is always trying to convince her to wear Western clothes, insisting that she will be more comfortable; he has never understood that it is only the clothing from home that makes her feel comfortable. When Shanthi wears her saris, she can close her eyes and block out the brutal cold; she can imagine herself back in Colombo, in her father’s study perhaps, sitting beside him under the lazy ceiling fan, working out the answer to a problem he’s set her—or in the market with her mother, listening to the cries of the fruit and vegetable sellers, fingering the rows of cheap glass bangles. She would throw a few coins to an armless beggar and feel rich, and blessed, and lucky. Once, Aravindan had refused to buy her new saris, and so Shanthi had worn the same green sari every day for a month, to faculty dinners and receptions, until he was so ashamed that he gave in.
She crosses the bridge over Lake Shore Drive, her fingers icy against the metal handrail. She walks out onto the broken stones, the massive rocks leaning into the lake. Her feet are still nimble, and for a moment she remembers the dancer she was as a little girl. If she had never studied physics, never gone to England, whom would she have married? Would she have become the perfect wife, the Sita of the story? Shanthi stands there a long time, watching the waves crash hard against the unyielding stone, feeling the wind whip against her, before turning back for the long walk home.
It has become apparent that the demon Ravana is only going through the motions. Sita does not know why he stole her away at all; he appears to have lost all interest. If he really wanted her, he could have taken her by now, before she ever made it to the tower’s edge. If she jumped, he could snatch her out of the falling air. What could she do to resist him?
“SHANTHI, COME TO BED. COME TO BED, RASATHI.”
Rasathi. Aravindan is full of soft touches and honeyed words these days, the guilt lacing through him. She can tell. You don’t marry a man against your mother’s wishes, you don’t give up your work to have his children, you don’t spend a decade sleeping by his side without knowing when something has changed. Shanthi doesn’t know who the woman was, but she knew when it started, and when it ended. Months of carrying on, and Shanthi never said a word, to anyone. If she had written to her mother in Colombo, she knows what would have come back—written in a pale hand on fragile onionskin paper, instructions to be patient, be understanding, and perhaps to take a little more trouble with her appearance. Instead Shanthi cooked with abandoned fury, dissolving entire sticks of butter into the uppuma, tossing the rice with toasted almond oil, heaping her plate high with spicy potatoes. Ate bite after bite until her stomach felt swollen, painful, and the sweat rolled down her face. When the affair ended, she almost relented, almost gave in. Almost.
“Soon. When the news is finished, I’ll come.” Let him toss and turn in the bed, hungry for relief that will not come from her. A brief, warm pleasure kindles in her stomach at the thought. Perhaps this is why she hates Aravindan most of all—because he has turned her mean and spiteful, bitter and old. When they met, Shanthi placed her hand in his, let herself be drawn down, down to the sweet green grass. She listened to his words of love and thought she had found her prince, her Rama. Later, she felt herself betrayed; she comforted herself with bitterness, thought herself trapped with an uncaring demon, a Ravana. But she finds it harder these days to disappear into either fairy tale, either fantasy.
When Shanthi is feeling particularly fair, she doesn’t hate Aravindan at all. Sometimes, she only hates herself.
At the end of the story, Sita is rescued, the demon is killed, the monkey king dances in triumph. But the people demand that she die, for she is only a woman, and undoubtedly she has betrayed her husband by now. She could not live so long in a barbarian land and not open her thighs for the demon. They know that all women are faithless, in the end.
She is lost, alone, and when Sita turns to her prince, he does not stand by her, he does not hold her up, exhausted as she is by all of these difficulties, more than any princess should bear. Rama claims to love her, to believe her—yet he gestures to the screaming crowds and says sadly that he cannot defy them. He is not an evil man, but he is, in the final analysis, weak.
What should happen now? Should Sita walk away from her prince?
EVENTUALLY, SHANTHI CANNOT KEEP HER EYES OPEN ANY LONGER; she checks on the sleeping girls, then goes to her bedroom, to her marriage bed. Aravindan is long asleep, turned toward her half of the bed. She stands there, watching him sleep—then climbs under the covers and lies down with her back to him. Shanthi closes her eyes, feels the heat of Aravindan’s body beside her, slowly warming the chilled sheets. She wishes she knew how to open to him again, wonders if he could warm her. Or, if it is too late for them, wonders if there might be another path for her.
But what would she do, without her husband, her children? Whatever else she might have been is long gone; the paths are barred by walls of thorns.
It is late, and Shanthi knows how this story ends.
Sita volunteers to undergo the trial by fire, to have her virtue tested; what else can she do to keep Rama by her side? She is nothing without her husband, so what can she do, alone in a strange forest, with the sun going down?
Sita walks into the flames, her body consumed, her spirit rising up, up, up. The princess flees home, to her sisters’ bedrooms, her mother’s arms. But they do not know her, they shriek in horror at this ghost, this pale monster. Her father might have known her, but he is long since dead. So she returns, weeping salt tears in the night, her spirit crossing the bitter sea once more. Sita returns to her burning body, walks out of the fire, cooling so quickly as she goes, until she is solid again, composed of ice and snow. She never knew ice until her exile began. Sita walks out of the fire, her body transparent and brittle, but the prince does not notice. Perhaps he chooses not to notice. He takes her in his arms to the crowd’s acclaim, he lays her down in the forest grass.
This is supposed to be a happy ending.
Other Cities
Chicago, 1962
TWENTY YEARS AGO, IN THE LIBRARY AT OXFORD; THE DECEMBER SUN SHAFTING DOWN THROUGH TALL WINDOWS, ILLUMINATING THE long wood tables w
ith the gift of peace. Silence. It had never been silent in Jaffna, in his parents’ house, with his mother and sister always talking talking. Talking and never doing, and all Aravindan wanted was to do, to get up and go, somewhere, anywhere. Somewhere where he could be more than his parents’ son, his sister’s brother. And so he worked, worked all the time because that was the only way to get away. He liked it too, the math. Liked it well enough, though perhaps never quite as well as he was supposed to. But well enough to get him out. Passing exams with high marks, getting a scholarship to graduate study at Oxford. His parents had sent him off with their best wishes and many tears. His heart had been beating faster than he could count, and once he was on the boat, standing up against the rail, he pressed his hand to his chest, hard. His mouth alternately dry with fear and wet with excitement.
He had abandoned the sterile math library that Christmas break to take refuge in the Bodleian, in its faded stone walls and high archedceilings, in its comfortable wood chairs, worn down by decades of students. He studied in the deserted library until his brain ached, the symbols spinning in his head, until he had to rest, had to put his head down against the fine-grained wood. Aravindan heard her then, crying in the next aisle. Crying softly; if the library hadn’t been absolutely silent, he would never have heard a thing. He knew then that she wasn’t a white girl; white girls were noisy and cheerful—he’d never seen one cry, but there was no quietness in them, even for tears. This girl cried just like his sister, Mala, had, at the docks, so close to silent that only he, only her brother, could have heard her over their mother’s wailing. Aravindan hadn’t said a word to his sister then—what could he say? He was abandoning her, though she had begged him not to go. Mala was fourteen; she understood nothing. She didn’t know what it was to feel that urge to fly, that craving in his throat, the sick shifting in his stomach, like a bird fluttering there, that said he could not stand it here, not a day, not a moment more. And then be forced to stay, day after day after day.
Because he had left his sister behind, left her without a word or a touch, he got up from his books, went to this weeping girl—and yes, he knew who she was. Shanthi, a year behind him and in physics instead of math, from Colombo rather than Jaffna, but what was a small stretch of ground between two lost travelers in a cold land? Their cities were neighbors, and though he was not sorry for his flight, he knew what it was to long for the sun, for the sour tang of his mother’s rusum on his tongue, for the songs of his sister in the evening with chirping crickets for company. Aravindan came to Shanthi in the library and sat down in the next chair; he reached out to her head buried in her arms upon her books and stroked her hair, long and black, sweetly redolent of sandalwood and coconut oil. Like Mala’s hair, like his mother’s hair, but softer, a waterfall of silk, a river down to a dark sea. She looked up at him once, then put her head down again. He stroked her hair as she cried, until the last of the sun had disappeared from the long windows, the wide wood tables. His hand was shaking.
He first kissed her under the tall trees, the spreading oaks and ash; he walked with her in early spring gardens full of daffodils and pale irises. These plants his parents had never seen; they wouldn’t, couldn’t carry tales back across the wide wide ocean, to the banyan trees, the coconut palms, the bougainvillea climbing brilliantly pink over his mother’s kitchen window.
They did not speak the same language. Both Tamil, yes, but her Tamil was not the same as his. Their ancestors had crossed the ocean in small boats, crossing to the island, three hundred years before the birth of Christ, but his family had stayed in the north, immersed in Tamil language and culture, while her family had moved south to the capital, spoken Sinhalese to the servants in the evenings, and Tamil rarely. They murmured their love words in English instead, in the language of knowledge, hope, the future. Not even an errant breeze could carry these words back to their parents. Aravindan kissed Shanthi’s neck, her breast, her navel. His fingers cupped her silk-clad thigh. That word, thigh—like sigh, like the sounds she made as his fingers slid under her shirt, dipped inside her skirt. She never removed her clothes, so neither did he, though he ached for the length of her body to be pressed against his, without such artificial barriers.
They married in Oxford in the sweet summer, amid the climbing roses and over her mother’s distant wails. The church choir couldn’t drown out the voice in his head, the voice that said he had gone too far. Wealthy high-caste girl and only middling-high-caste boy. Though the father was dead, so what could her mother do to prevent them? If her parents had been wise, they would never have let Shanthi go so far away. Shanthi’s mother cried for three weeks straight, according to her eldest sister’s letters, written in steady hand on translucent blue paper.
England was caught up in the war, but they built a space for themselves, isolated and alone together. Quiet despite the screech of air-raid sirens; bright, despite the blackout curtains. They studied, they made love—Shanthi became pregnant, and in June they had a daughter. A year later the peace was signed, and their interlude was ended. Aravindan graduated, and there was a job, in America, so far away. He left his wife and daughter in the rain at Oxford that September—Shanthi agreed it was wise. She only had a year left, and they’d hired a woman to help her—soon Shanthi would finish, and then she and the baby could join him. He took the long boat trip, started research in Boston, working with bright minds, pushing harder and harder, and how he longed for his wife, for her curries almost as tasty as his mother’s, though always somewhat strange, ginger instead of garlic, fenugreek along with the fennel. He longed for the way she moved through the halls, swaying like a dancer, for the length of her body (only in the dark, but that was enough), pressed against the length of his. His head hurt at night; he lay on the rough wood floor in the dark, a wet cloth on his forehead, trying to think of math, thinking, instead, of her. Shanthi, sweet and creamy cool, like a mango lassi, chilled with ice. He was lying on the floor when the letter came that November. She was pregnant again.
Aravindan wanted to go to her then. To feel her belly swelling with his son. To rub coconut oil onto its sore stretching. To hold her in the mornings when the shudders racked through her. But the ocean was wide, the journey long, and she said that she could manage. It was a crucial time, a most important time, with his work getting harder, harder, harder. And more exciting too, he must admit. At times it seemed that perhaps he might love this after all, the quest to find out what and why and how. To unravel creation, to find a piece of the grand puzzle, to understand the underlying structure. He sent her letters, long letters full of English words. Words like love and heart and dearest. Words like patient and work and soon. Shanthi sent him pressed petals of roses from her small English garden, sketches of his first child, Kili, his daughter.
Two children were born, twin girls. Harini, Leilani. Aravindan went to her in Oxford, just after the birth, and held his new daughters in his arms. He smiled at his wife, but she didn’t smile back. Shanthi wept, and he did not know why; he held her, in the small room in the small house that she shared with two other women; he promised to fix whatever was wrong, but she could not tell him what it was. Darkness had come over her, and Aravindan did not know how to lift it. He told her that he had been offered a better position in Philadelphia. It was a great chance, an opportunity, an adventure. He asked her if she thought he should take it. Or should they stay in Boston, where she had been promised a job? Shanthi lay in his arms, her face pressed against his shoulder; she did not answer. She finished her degree a few weeks later, not well.
They got a girl from Ceylon to cook and clean; they had another child in Philadelphia, a girl, Mayil. They moved to New York, then Chicago. Aravindan continued to work, but the patterns that had seemed so clear began to fracture. Some days they all came together in a shining shape, a moment of perfection—and then they fell apart again, into confusion and dissonance. Shanthi started a new garden in Chicago, grew curry plants alongside the roses. He watched his daughters grow like
weeds. Four daughters, five, six.
The fifth daughter almost killed his wife; the child came out sideways, tearing through Shanthi’s delicate skin like paper, like a careless gardener pruning petals along with dead matter. Aravindan asked her to stop, not to try again, but she wanted to continue. Shanthi insisted, and he wondered if she wanted to give him a son. It would have been important, in Ceylon. Here, it seemed to matter less. After every child, her hair grew coarse, her eyes darker, her body thicker. Her voice grew harsh when she spoke to him, harsh and dry and thick with regrets. After their sixth daughter, Lakshmi, Shanthi started teaching high school, taught children algebra and geometry, forgot her physics.
Sometimes Aravindan closed his eyes and imagined himself back in the library at Oxford, hearing the weeping in the next aisle. Would he get up; would he stroke that silky hair? His throat closed up; the bird in his stomach fluttered fragile wings.
When his daughters were nine, seven, seven, six, five, and two, he kissed another woman. Carol Sawyer, a graduate student, the only woman in the math department, unless one counted the secretaries. A plain face, but long blonde hair like satin that curved over her knit sweater, brushed the waist of her skirt. Three years they’d worked together, and if he had wondered what it would be like to run his hands over her large pale breasts, to hide his face between her white thighs, to see her lying naked in the sunlight on the floor of his office, naked to his eyes the way his wife refused to be—if he’d wondered these things, at least he hadn’t acted. Aravindan kept his hands to himself, on his desk, at his side, clasped behind his back. He left the door open, always. He looked at Carol’s eyes, never her full lips, her slope of bared neck, the curve of arm, and long, thin fingers on graceful hands. When she wrote on the board, his eyes focused on the chalk, white marks crossing the green surface. She was brilliant, this girl. She might be better than he was, better than he’d ever been.
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