by Manil Suri
Here, then, is the stationmaster’s son, Rahim, who likes to pretend he is the keeper of Salim Fazl’s grave. For the past few days, he too has been spying on Dev. “Not one girl but two,” he breathlessly recounts about the encroachers on his domain. “And the second one, he got naked with.” He weaves an account so embellished, so provocative, that his mother turns off the stove and hurries out to investigate.
Meanwhile, I am thinking that perhaps it’s for the best Dev stopped when he did. He is handsome, it’s true, and I know my body still has a craving for him. But do I really feel what the songs promise, am I ready to be in love with him? What if I, too, am destined to marry a navy boy with white shoes and a hat to match? I squeeze my fingers over Dev’s, in a gesture I hope will convey nothing more than friendship. It is some minutes before the wife of the stationmaster bursts upon us holding hands in the grave.
chapter four
“I WAS MARRIED TO YOUR MOTHER WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN,” MY FATHER said. “My family needed paper in their printing business and her family owned lumber forests and a mill, so it was a logical match. Your mother was ten—she cried when the priest told her she couldn’t keep her doll with her during the ceremony. I remember how she clung on to that doll, so tight that the arm ripped right off when her father tried to pull it away. It was nothing more than a threadbare piece of cloth, and the cotton stuffing burst out into the air. I remember thinking what a silly girl this was, and so obstinate as well—perhaps village girls were brought up that way. When we sat in front of the fire, I knew what was happening, I knew I was being married to this girl, who was sobbing even now over the cotton fluff floating in the air. What I didn’t know was what marriage meant. What it meant for me to have this girl as my wife, this girl who would come to live in our house four years later, still clinging to the same filthy doll, with the arm sewn back on. Even if I had, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to question my parents. They had arranged the match before I was born, and they knew what was best.”
Paji’s eyes twinkled. Someone might have looked into them and mistaken it for merriment, but I knew it to be the glitter of rage.
“We had almost nothing in common. Not only had Rohini not been brought up in the city, but being a girl from a family of zamindars—perhaps the ones with the most land in the state—her parents had not bothered to school her. The only thing they taught her was to use her right thumbprint, and not her left, to sign her name. Still I did not complain.”
I was standing before Paji in the library. The walls were lined with the books his company had published. Roopa and Sharmila and I (perhaps even Biji) were all terrified of this room, since we were only summoned there if we had done something terribly wrong. Paji would break into long accounts of his life on such occasions, carefully watching our every tic and movement to appraise the escalating sense of dread he was creating. He would stop only when he was satisfied we had been punished enough, that it was time to unleash the full verbal force of his anger. Unlike Biji, Paji never hit us.
Today, I felt more anxious than usual. I knew, of course, why I had been summoned. The rumors had sprouted almost immediately, like tiny malodorous drupes, whose poisonous scent had quickly covered the five miles our neighborhood lay north of Nizamuddin. Roopa had been furious. “Don’t you have any self-respect? Don’t you know there are lines one never crosses? Could you really have been that jealous?” She had stopped talking to me before I could explain. The servants were all whispering and even the paanwalla around the corner seemed to leer insinuatingly when I walked past his stall.
Yesterday, after another sleepless night, I had decided that my best strategy would be to declare to Paji that I wanted to marry Dev. I knew Paji would be aghast, and forbid the match—but then the onus of dealing with the rumors would rest with him. I didn’t worry too much about the unlikely chance that he would agree. Since I didn’t have the nerve to make my outrageous proposition to Paji’s face, I had written out a letter and slipped it in with his evening mail.
But Paji was not ready to bring up the letter as yet. “My father wanted me to become a doctor,” he said. “He wanted to send me to England for my studies.” I stared obediently at the floor as Paji recounted how Biji became pregnant just as they were booking the passage. How the trip got cancelled, only to have the baby, a girl, be stillborn. Biji got very sick herself, and everyone expected her to die—so much so that Paji’s uncles started making inquiries about someone to replace her. “For some strange reason she managed to recover. The doctor said that having another baby would kill her. My family insisted I try again anyway, so I did.” Six years later, Roopa was born.
Paji never made it to England to become a doctor. Instead, he found himself shunted into his father Harilal’s printing business. Their main product was religious calendars—garish pictures of Lakshmi and Ganesh (Guru Nanak for the Sikhs), at the bottom of which were stapled a year’s worth of tear-off dates. “Imagine my horror—I, who had always fancied myself an atheist—suddenly surrounded by these divine elephants and goddesses and their dozens of arms all day. I was so depressed I could barely drag myself to the factory. I got my clothes caught in the machinery. I developed allergies to the smell of ink. Fortunately for me, the Partition came.”
At this point, Paji always reminded us that we were one of the lucky families, escaping Rawalpindi unscathed, even if someone did shoot our dog the day before we left. Harilal, though, had to leave everything behind. A Muslim employee took over, stapling the 1948 dates (which had already been printed up) to stylized quotations from the Koran instead.
It was relatively easy to set things up again in India. Harilal was assigned a press in Karol Bagh abandoned by the British. “I knew I had to dissuade him from returning to the calendars—I couldn’t go back to dealing with the multi-armed Ganesh.” Paji spoke desperately to his father about Nehru’s secular vision for the new country—how what was needed were publications to soothe the rancor of Partition, to bring Hindus and Muslims together. He managed to sell Harilal on a set of pamphlets he had seen in a foreign magazine: selections from the world’s most famous philosophers, everyone from Plato to Nietzsche. Harilal agreed to an initial printing of two thousand sets, each consisting of sixteen small volumes, with embossed covers and gold-edged pages.
“Unfortunately, the Hindus and Muslims were still not quite done with the business of killing each other. My Nietzsche initiative languished unread in the warehouse. Eventually, the covers were ripped off and the pages sold to the scrap collector. To add insult to injury, the collector claimed that the gold coloring was an impurity, and paid us two paise less per kilogram than ordinary newsprint.”
I braced myself as Paji embarked on the last part of his tale. The decision by Harilal to start publishing government documents instead. The second press they had to buy within months to keep up with the demands of the rapacious new bureaucracy. A year after Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, Paji was allowed to publish a book about the freedom struggle, which sold respectably and brought good reviews from the press. By the time Harilal died in 1952, Paji had reconciled himself to the idea that he would remain a publisher all his life.
“It wasn’t something I would have willingly chosen. I still loathed the smell of ink. My wife still had nothing in common with me. Do you know what it feels like to be a publisher and be married to someone who can’t even read?
“I suppose my unhappiness must have shown from the beginning. Perhaps that’s why my mother started beating Rohini every Friday after Roopa came. Or perhaps it was because your mother only gave me girls. In any case, I didn’t interfere. I made it a point to leave early on Fridays, knowing what would happen. When I returned, Rohini would be resting in the dark like a patient recovering from some weekly treatment. She would move slowly as she went to the kitchen to have my dinner prepared. Perhaps some Fridays she was only pretending, perhaps my mother didn’t really beat her every week. Looking back, it’s not something I’m proud of. I should have put a stop t
o it. It didn’t do me any good to have my wife beaten. Her misery didn’t lessen my own.
“There was another girl the year after you came. But she was born with a breathing obstruction and survived only two days. Then came Sharmila. Counting the two that didn’t live, this was the fifth girl to emerge from your mother’s womb. Seeing your younger sister killed my mother’s spirit. She stopped beating Rohini. She died within the year. Sometimes I wonder if Rohini produced girls on purpose, just to drive my mother to her death.
“In any case, I decided to make my peace with your mother. I started coming back on Fridays with gifts. But this made your mother very suspicious. She thought I had kept another woman. When I tried to teach her to write, she refused, saying I should go teach my tart instead. She threw all my presents away. The only thing she kept was the lipstick, and even this she insisted on using, like a rustic might, for the bindi on her forehead, not her lips. A lifetime of ignorance is hard to wipe away.
“Do you know what a struggle it was for me to have you all educated? Your mother fought me every step of the way. ‘They’re the granddaughters of a zamindar,’ she would declare, even after her family had lost every scrap of land they owned to Pakistan. ‘They need to learn the supervision of servants, nothing else.’ But for all the things I did wrong in my life, I knew one mistake I was not going to make. I wasn’t going to send my daughters into the world unprepared. I wasn’t going to let them suffer their mother’s fate. Or mine, for that matter. I promised myself I would find them good matches. Husbands who were compatible, who were solid, who came from the right background. Who were worthy of marrying the daughter of a Sawhney.”
Paji’s eyes had turned opaque. On his face was a smile, the edges so curled with bitterness that I had to look away.
“This Dev of yours has not a thing going for him. His father blows whistles after trains. He wants to go to Bombay and become a singer, you say. This is a husband you’re talking about—your life, you understand. Even a dog looks around more before he finds a place to relieve himself. What potion did he drug you with to make you disgrace yourself with him this way?”
Paji paused, as if waiting for me to answer, though he knew I wouldn’t.
“That’s right, be silent now. You’ve done your damage, what more could you have to add? Roopa says that even her in-laws have heard—what if they were to call off her marriage? Did you ever stop to think what effect your stupidity would have on her future? There’s only one way to put an end to these rumors. To give in to your foolishness. To have you marry him. This Dev, who doesn’t even have the courage to come show his face. Tell his family in Nizamuddin to call on me. They’re not fit to eat off our plates, but what choice have you left me with?”
For a moment, I simply stared at Paji, trying to digest his decision. Was he pretending, trying to scare me, trying to teach me a lesson? It seemed unthinkable that he could agree to my far-fetched proposal. Why had I imagined that imposing my will in this way would leave me elated?
I stumbled towards the door. “Meera,” Paji called out behind me. “You may not realize this now, but you’ve just ruined your life.”
NOBODY WANTED IT TO BE a double wedding, but it turned out to be too costly to have two separate ones. In a fit of pique, Roopa had her henna ceremony shifted by a day so it wouldn’t coincide with mine. She was quick to appropriate the best saris and the most expensive sets of jewelry from the dowries Biji had set aside for us. As the day of the wedding drew closer, she found fault with a thousand niggling details, even complaining at one point that the Brahmin assigned to perform her ceremony wasn’t as priestly-looking as mine (they were exchanged). She made sure that Ravinder’s family didn’t have to mingle with Dev’s, arranging the seating so that the bridal guests formed a wall of separation between the two sides.
The shehnai players had just started coaxing out their mournful wedding music from their instruments when the inevitable happened—Roopa came face to face with Dev. He was unable to say anything, looking at my sister with the wide-eyed longing of an abandoned child, cutting such a pitiful figure that I almost felt sorry for him. But Roopa played her part perfectly, congratulating him with just the right touch of modesty, even remembering the correct form of “Jijaji” to address him as her brother-in-law. Then Dev’s fifteen-year-old sister Hema sidled up to them. “Isn’t this the one you really wanted to marry?” she asked her brother. My only satisfaction in overhearing the comment was that it wiped the demureness off Roopa’s face.
For the ceremony, the priests consecrated two identical fires facing each other under the canopy. Paji seated himself exactly in the middle, a role model of impartiality. Hema seemed more interested in what was happening with Roopa’s fire—she kept craning her neck to track the offerings made, perhaps to make sure our side wasn’t being short-changed. The separate streams of Sanskrit incantations merged into one and rose with the smoke into the air.
I had expected Biji to cry during the ceremony, but to my surprise, Paji’s face turned ashen as well. He seemed mesmerized by the holy thread glistening across the priests’ chests—every so often, he pulled out his handkerchief to dab at his lips. As soon as the seven circles were complete, he excused himself to go lie down, saying the smoke from the fire had gone into his eyes. I realized then that the chanting and the oblations had been more religion than Paji could take.
When it came time to throw the rice, Roopa cast it over her shoulder with such aplomb that I wondered if she had been practicing. The women behind her all closed their eyes and let it shower over them like an auspicious rain. Even her tears were perfect, stopping as if on cue midway down her cheeks, from where they could scintillate with maximum effect. “My eldest, my light, my life,” Biji wailed, running with raised arms to hug her a second time before she got into the waiting flower-decked Fiat.
Then it was my turn, and the tears clung so thickly that I could barely make out the grains of rice on the platter to gather up in my fist. I let the rice run out behind my shoulder in farewell. The last time I cry, I said to myself, silently repeating the words my grandmother had taught me. I would shed no more tears for what I was leaving behind.
By now Biji had worked herself into a hysterical state, and was going around with her sari outstretched like a beggar. “Two,” she kept repeating, like someone trying to explain the enormity of a tragedy, “two of them I’m losing tonight.” She embraced me violently, and held me plugged into her chest, as if finally transferring a cache of affection she had been hoarding through the years. As my aunts pulled us apart, I noticed something unusual about her lips. They were the same shade as the bindi smudged across her forehead—my mother had broken down and applied lipstick to them.
Instead of a Fiat, what stood on the road awaiting me was a doli. Dev’s family had owned it for generations. “Which century are these people from that they haven’t chopped that thing up for firewood?” Paji had thundered, when I told him their custom of carrying their brides home in the wooden palanquin. “Haven’t they heard of an invention called a car? Don’t they know my daughter isn’t some village illiterate they can parade around in a cage?”
What was decided, finally, was that I would be carried in the doli only to and from the truck transporting the women back to Nizamuddin. I could come out if I wanted and walk around on the truck bed, but between the time I relinquished my father’s house and the instant I entered Dev’s, my feet were not to touch the ground.
I looked at the faded animals and trees painted on the sides, at the worn handle carvings at the ends of the two poles, at the gold-bordered red cloth covering the doli’s flat top. It seemed tiny, like something built for a doll. “You’ll be comfortable once you’re inside, don’t worry,” Dev’s mother said as she helped me in. “Twelve miles they carried me in it when I was married, and not on a truck either, but on their shoulders.” She undid the strings at the top of the opening. “Just remember to crouch a little like that—it’s a good position for a bride to learn.�
�� I had one final glimpse of my mother being held back by her sisters at the gate before the flap came tumbling down.
It was not completely dark inside—light filtered in through a small grilled window in the front. I sat as Dev’s mother had instructed, with my hands around my legs and my chin resting on my knees. The air was heavy with the odor of wood, wood that I imagined was perfumed with the hopes and fears of all the brides it had held over the years. I tried to feel the flutter in their hearts, see the anticipation on their faces, taste the salt in their tears. What must it have been like to leave their villages for the first time in this box, to be carried through valleys and jungles, over mountains and streams? To be delivered to an unknown destiny, revolving around a husband whose face one might never have seen?
Doli scenes from movies began to run through my head—scenes where the heroine cries, or sings a song, or even takes poison. Then, abruptly, the screen in my mind went white. It was as if a sudden, terrifying realization had burned right through the film in the projector. The realization that I wasn’t in a movie, that I was no longer playacting. That I was an adult now, and this was my life.
Usually when one awakes from a dream, it is difficult to reconstruct the exact flow of events, since only a few vivid scenes might remain in one’s memory. When the spell of the last several months finally broke that evening, I was not so fortunate. Every impulse I’d had, every game I’d played, every maneuver and juvenile ploy, unspooled with excruciating clarity through my head. Logically, step by unflinching step, I was guided through the exact sequence of actions that had led me to my crouch in that darkened interior.
Before I could fully absorb this new state of consciousness, the doli shuddered to life. I felt myself jostled forward, then back, as the poles on either end were lifted not quite simultaneously. There was an up-and-down bob, and a side-to-side jounce as well, and I pressed my palms flat against the walls to steady myself. Outside, as if to mock my awakening from the movies, the wedding band struck up a triumphant film tune. I imagined the uniformed musicians sweating as they walked along, blowing into their tubas, pumping their trombones. “Every treasure in the sky,” the song went, and I wished I could peel the top off to watch the stars drift over my head. Down below on earth, was my mother still there, had she broken free of my aunts to run tearfully behind? And my father—had he come out to watch, regret blooming inside, his stoniness crumbling as I was borne out of his sight?
