An Unrestored Woman

by Shobha Rao

  By now the horse had nearly reached the end of the esplanade leading away from the train station. Renu watched it go. When it reached the main road, she wondered, would it continue south, or would it turn and go east, or would it go west? The horse paused, and she saw the driver’s arm reach out to adjust the reins, swat them against the horse’s back, and then she saw it make its turn. West. Renu walked back under the Gothic arches of the train station and proceeded to the ticket counters.

  * * *

  She reached Ahmedabad the next morning. She wanted a bath so she walked from the railway station to the Sabarmati and, concealing her sweater and shawl under a thicket, waded into the river. The water was cold, silken, and when she dipped her head under it, it passed over her scalp with the thickness and the strength of a hand. Renu reemerged and saw a group of laundresses on the banks, beating piles of damp saris against the rocks. She waved to them but they only stared at her. She dripped a trail of water behind her as she approached them, her shalwar kameez soaked and clinging to her body. One of the laundresses, a young girl, bright with sunlight gleaming on her wet face, pointed at Renu’s chest and laughed. “So you’re a girl.”

  Renu laughed too, and asked them if she could help them in exchange for food. They laughed again, and said, “These saris are heavier than you are,” and gave her a tin of chapati and rajma and curd. She ate every last morsel in the tin without stopping, licked it clean, and said, “Not anymore.”

  The girl who’d first spoken to her walked over to Renu and sat down next to her. She smelled of the freshness of soap, river silt, and sweat. Her skin was as dark as the horse’s had been. “What else can you do?” she asked.

  “Anything,” Renu said. “Cook, clean, raise goats.”

  The young laundress giggled. “Did you hear that, Sindhu, goats!” One of the other girls looked over and shook her head. Renu and the young laundress turned back to the river. It was swifter now; the wind had picked up, and from the west rushed a bank of gray clouds. “I’ve heard the memsahib needs a new maid. When can you start?” the laundress asked.

  “Now,” Renu said.

  * * *

  The memsahib was the beautiful, young wife of a diamond merchant. That evening, when Renu met her, she was sitting on her divan with so many glittering jewels covering her neck and face that she drowned out the light of the oil lamps that surrounded her. Renu stared at her with open curiosity and awe.

  The memsahib smiled luxuriously and said, “You’ve never seen this many jewels, have you?”

  “I’ve never seen a jewel,” Renu said.

  “What do you think of them?”

  “I think you’d be more beautiful without them.”

  There was silence. Renu looked at her and sensed the kind of sadness she had sensed in Neela. But why should a destitute girl in a refugee camp and the wealthy wife of a diamond merchant have the same kind of sadness? “Well,” the memsahib said after a few moments, “are you just going to stand there or are you going to fetch me my slippers?”

  That was the only indication Renu was to ever get that she was hired. She worked steadily and satisfactorily for the memsahib. In the mornings, her duties were to bring the memsahib’s breakfast, massage her hair with oils, draw her bath, and then help her to dress. In the afternoons all her maids gathered and they either played games or one sang and played the flute while the memsahib, whose name was Savitri, napped or practiced her sitar. The evenings were busiest, and always tense. Renu rushed to draw the memsahib another bath, and helped her to prepare for the merchant’s attentions: her hair was plaited with flowers, jewelry was selected with great care, scents and oils were applied. Only once, after her bath, did the memsahib sigh and whisper, “What does it even matter?”

  Renu paused in stringing a garland of flowers. “How do you mean, memsahib?” she asked.

  “He’s always in an opium haze, anyway.”

  And so there was the reason for the sadness, Renu realized. And maybe it was because of this sadness, or maybe because of the way Renu looked at her—without lowering her eyes like the other maids—that she, within a month of arriving in Ahmedabad, became the memsahib’s lover.

  * * *

  This went on for two years. The memsahib would go to her husband’s bedroom and when she returned late into the night, she stripped off her jewels and left a trail of them leading from the door to the bed, where Renu waited for her. And it was true, what she had said: the memsahib was far more beautiful without her jewels. Sometimes, before she had even finished undressing, Renu would pull her into the bed and kiss her deeply, she would take the chunni that drifted from her shoulders and tie up her hands. Then she would tickle the loose ends of the chunni over her body until Savitri squealed with delight before wrapping it tightly around her slender neck. It was only then that Renu lowered herself between her legs. Savitri would gasp for breath, but then she would also smile. Renu once loosened the chunni and asked, “What if your husband finds out?”

  Savitri lolled her head to the side and sighed and said, “Then you’ll be led to the Sabarmati, if you’re lucky.”

  Renu retightened the cloth and a tingle went down her spine. She wondered at it—at the coldness of the memsahib’s words—and knew the end was inevitable. That the end would come. And if it were to catch her unawares then no one—not the memsahib, not her wits, nothing—would save her.

  * * *

  It was around this time, during the third year that Renu was in the diamond merchant’s employ, that she actually spoke to him for the first time. She was walking past the veranda one evening, on her way to the memsahib’s quarters, when she heard two men talking. One, the much older of the two, was hunched over a thick ledger while the other, whom she’d never seen before but was clearly the diamond merchant—with his silk kurta embroidered in gold, polished hands, and air of gentility—was looking out toward the vast gardens that surrounded the house.

  “It’s always two, never more than two,” the man with the ledger was saying.

  The diamond merchant looked at the old man, seemed to consider the statement, and said, “Then it can’t be him. It must be a counting mistake. He could steal any number if he wanted to. Why always two?”

  Renu stopped on the marble steps leading up the veranda and said, “Two what?”

  Both men turned to stare. The old man might’ve even gasped. Renu stood absolutely still. She held her breath. The words had simply come out of her, and she braced for whatever would come next. “The impudence!” the old man shouted, his lips quivering. “How dare you speak to the sahib.” But the diamond merchant only looked at her curiously. “Diamonds,” he said, smiling. “Two diamonds.”

  “He, whoever he is, will never steal more,” Renu said, ascending a step, braver. “That’s what he’ll always steal: two.”

  “And how is it that you know that?” the merchant asked. The old man, by now, seemed in a state of shock. He was practically torpid.

  “Because we had a woman in our camp, nice woman, with two small sons. She was in charge of making the morning roti. And every afternoon we would always come up eight short. Always eight. Not seven, not nine. Eight. When we asked her about it she said they were being stolen by a colony of monkeys that lived nearby, in the trees surrounding the camp. But that couldn’t be true, could it? Monkeys don’t count out eight. So we realized it had to be her, because that’s how people are: they like order, they tend toward it. She was, of course, taking the same number every day to feed her sons. And this man, whoever is stealing the diamonds, only takes two. He always will.”

  Both men were silent for a moment. Then the diamond merchant laughed out loud. He turned to the old man. “Who is she?” he asked.

  “One of the memsahib’s maids,” he replied.

  The diamond merchant seemed to consider this for a moment then he leaned over and whispered something in the old man’s ears. The old man’s expression soured, but he nodded. And that is how Renu came to be summoned to the diamond me
rchant’s quarters the following afternoon.

  * * *

  The diamond merchant’s quarters were even more opulent than the memsahib’s. Renu was led into the main room through a series of long stone and marble hallways; there were exquisite temple sculptures along the walls, and lush carpets on the floors. She heard the tinkle of water as they neared the main room and realized, when she entered it, that it was coming from a pink marble fountain in the center of the room. Four maidens rose out of the water, offering lotuses and with eyes that Renu could only assume were rubies. Beyond was a bed covered in sheets of shimmering silk and gold and beyond even that was a row of sculpted pillars that led into a private garden that Renu had never seen. And there, leaning against one of the pillars and looking out over the garden, stood the diamond merchant.

  The servant who had shown her here had left, Renu noticed with dismay. She raised her chunni over her bald head and wondered whether to address the diamond merchant or wait for him to address her. She waited. After some minutes passed—during which Renu studied the women in the fountain—the merchant, without once turning around, said, “How long do you plan on standing there?”

  Renu picked up her lehenga and hurried toward him. She stopped just before she reached him. He turned to face her. His face was still smooth, but his hair was thinning, she noticed. He had the same air of richness, of wealth, as the memsahib, but unlike her, whose expression was alert and sometimes anxious, he seemed bored. Bored in a way that Renu couldn’t possibly understand, not while standing in the most beautiful room she’d ever seen, not with a private garden, and a fountain, and a bed so richly made.

  He brushed her chunni from her head and smiled sadly and said, “You look like the boy I always wanted to be.”

  Then he looked at her, for so long that Renu didn’t think it possible without blinking. She wondered if that was her cue to do something but she couldn’t imagine what that might be. She raised her eyes to his and saw that he was hardly there; that his eyes had such a faraway look in them, a look of such forlornness that she wondered if it was best to simply leave. But then he took her hand. He gripped it, really, and it seemed to Renu that now he was pleading with her. Not pleading, no, but searching. Searching for something he had lost. As if she might know where it was. As if she might help him find it. Renu started to say she hadn’t the slightest clue, how could she, without even knowing what it was, but as soon as she opened her mouth he covered it with his, and kissed her.

  * * *

  And so that was how Renu came to be a lover to both the diamond merchant and the diamond merchant’s wife. Her days were divided between them. In the late afternoons she visited the merchant. They made love, then she filled his opium pipe and talked to him while he smoked—about her life, about the camp, once even about Neela—until he fell into a deep fog. Then he would wave her away. The evenings were the same as they had been: she helped the memsahib prepare for her evening with the diamond merchant, and then waited for her in her bed. The arrangement, if either was aware of it, didn’t seem to bother them. Besides, as Renu soon came to realize, the wealthy had only one rule: anything was allowed, or at least considered, as long as it didn’t diminish their wealth.

  During one of her afternoons with the diamond merchant, after he’d begun to smoke, he asked her to tell him a story.

  “What kind of story?” Renu asked.

  “One that you heard a long time ago,” he said.

  “A long time ago?”

  She thought for a moment and then she began. “Once upon a time,” she said, “there lived a king with three sons. Now this king was old, and he knew he was going to die soon, but he wanted to leave his kingdom to his most worthy son. The one who would preserve it, be frugal with it. And so he decided to test them. He gave each of his sons a hundred rupees and an empty room. He told them that whoever could fill the room—fill it completely, without a single empty pocket of space—for the least amount of money would inherit his kingdom.

  “He returned the following week and went to the eldest son’s room. The eldest son gave him eighty rupees back and the king saw that he’d filled the room with discarded paper. Old newspapers, really. And that he’d stuffed them into every corner of the room. The king nodded approvingly and went to the second son’s room. This son gave him ninety rupees back. The king was pleased, and saw that he’d filled the room with garbage. Lots and lots of garbage. But it was ingenious, and he’d only spent ten rupees. So then the king went to his youngest son’s room. Now when he reached this room, his son gave him ninety-nine rupees back. The king, as you can imagine, was astonished. ‘But how,’ he cried, ‘how could you possibly fill a room with one rupee?’

  “The youngest son smiled. He opened the door and in the middle of it was a lit candle. The room was filled with light. ‘I spent seventy-five paisa on the candle,’ the son said, ‘and twenty-five paisa for a box of matches.’ The king was overjoyed, and so the youngest son, to great fanfare, was crowned king.”

  At the end of the story Renu looked over at the diamond merchant, but he was asleep. Or at least his eyes were closed. Renu studied his face, in the dim of late afternoon, with the sweetness of the opium smoke drifting around her. All trace of boredom and pleading and searching were gone, his face was as simple and as incorruptible as a child’s. She wondered if that was an effect of the opium, or if that was his true self. Beyond that she wondered at how fond she’d grown of him. She wondered that she might even be in love with him.

  * * *

  The end came. The end did come. It was during one of Renu’s afternoons with the diamond merchant. She was packing his pipe, and he was watching her. “I’m sailing for Durban next week,” he said casually. “I’ll be back in three months.”

  Renu looked up. “Durban? Where is that?”

  “It’s in South Africa.”

  “Where’s that?”

  The diamond merchant rose from his divan and went to a teakwood cabinet in the corner of the room. He took a key from the inside of his silk kurta and opened it. Inside Renu saw a stack of bills, and boxes, and sheets rolled and tied with ribbon. It was one of these that the diamond merchant extracted and placed before Renu. She looked at him and then she untied it. It was a map, and though Renu had never seen one, she understood what it was immediately. It took her breath away. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen: the thick creamy paper, the countries strung together like jewels, the sprawling blue of all the seas she’d never seen.

  “Where is it?” she asked again.

  He pointed to Durban.

  “And where are we?”

  He pointed to Ahmedabad. Renu gasped. “So far away,” she said, breathing.

  That night she lay in bed and thought about the map. Not so much about the map as what it meant. And she thought about the events of her life, none of them very interesting, she had to admit, but each of them a stepping-stone across a strange and lonely place. The diamond merchant would leave, and then he would return. Their triangle would continue, and then they would all grow old, old, old. In the end the diamond merchant and Savitri would have their money, and each other, but what would Renu have?

  The thought of what she must do made her sad but Renu knew that every moment from when she’d stood outside the Delhi train station—every single one—had led to this one.

  * * *

  On the afternoon before the diamond merchant was due to depart, Renu came to him as usual. She wore her most beautiful lehenga, a deep turquoise with silver threading. When she entered he took her to his bed without a word and made love to her. Afterward she smiled at him, she took his face in her hands and placed it over her bare chest. He said, sleepily, “You know what, Renu? You’re the candle and the match.” Renu let out a cry. His words, his hot breath against her breasts seemed to her the truest effluence of love, and she thought for a moment—the briefest moment—that she would not do as she had planned.

  In the end she sat beside him while he lay on his diva
n, and packed his opium pipe. He was talking about the mines he was to visit in South Africa. He had been there many times, and he told her about the people there, how dark and different they looked, how mysterious and bold and so black they were almost purple. He told her about the endless plains, reaching to a distant and knifelike horizon. He paid her no attention. And Renu, listening attentively, continued to pack his pipe. It was more than was necessary, but she could take no chances.

  She waited while he smoked it. She leaned against his divan and watched. He closed his eyes. She continued to wait. She waited until the moon came up over his garden. The silver light creeping like hands across the grass and over the marble floor. She decided, Until it reaches my feet, that’s how long I’ll wait. And so she waited. And only when the moonlight touched the very tip of her heel did she rise and press her head against the diamond merchant’s chest, making certain it was still.

  She took the key from under his kurta, opened the teak cabinet, and took out the stack of bills. But she had to open all the boxes to find what she was actually looking for. When she did she emptied the contents of the pouch onto her palm. And even in the moonlight they glistened, and they reminded her of the Shivaliks, their summits so pure, covered in snow and crystalline and shining, treacherous, and as deadly as diamonds.