In the Convent of Little Flowers

by Indu Sundaresan

  In college in the city, whether it was because of the Maserati or not, Sat was Ram’s closest friend. They were both in mechanical engineering, both in the same year; both also looked alike with the same hand-on-hip stance when they were quizzical, a similar smile when they saw a girl they liked. And there was a girl they both liked very much in college. Her name was … well, her actual name doesn’t matter, they call her Sara now.

  Ram saw Sara first. She was a year older than them, also in mechanical engineering, and different from the girls they had known and dated before. Sara’s parents did not have money, and that summed up the difference more accurately than anything else could. Sara was a serious, studious girl. She had long hair that she plaited down her back and thick eyeglasses that gave her a mild squint. She wore only salwar-kameez sets, rarely pants or skirts, and she took the city bus to college. She had a lovely, sweet voice, and this Ram and Sat heard for the first time when the principal of the college called Sara up onstage at the morning assembly to sing the national anthem when the regular singer was absent. They took notice then, glancing at each other during the anthem.

  That afternoon, Ram passed Sara and a group of girls under the shade of a tree on campus and stayed there below the outermost fringe of the tree’s leaves watching as a breeze brushed over her clothes, molding the thin cotton cloth to her breasts and her hips. She laughed and took off her glasses to wipe the laughter from her eyes. The wind swept gently over her hair. And Ram, who had never been denied anything in his life, went up to her, among her friends, and said, “Would you like to get a cup of coffee at the canteen with me?”

  She said yes. Of course. But not before she had put her glasses back on and bowed her head in shyness. Ram was enchanted.

  The next day, Sat said, “You took her first, you bastard.” And that was all he said. Ram and Sara dated all through college, for the next three years.

  The children leave the room and Sita rises from the bed to go to the bathroom. When they were first married, it was her walk that most irritated Ram, a sort of jerk and go, jerk and stop. Sita used to flail on high heels, pleading that she had never worn them before. Ram taught her how to walk, not just walk toward him, but walk away from him so that she captured his gaze and kept it. She uses it now, unconsciously graceful, loose-limbed from sleep, her hair cascading down her back. He likes watching his wife walk. Even at the club meeting, as she approaches the glass bowl with the keys, she walks so that no one can look away. Not just because of what she is about to do, but because they all either want her or want to be like her. And Ram has taught her this.

  She is silent as she shuts the bathroom door. He will not hear her speak again today, and her first words to him will be tomorrow evening when he holds out his hand for her after the Laugh Class. He will say, “Coming home?”

  And she will say, as she always says, “Sure.”

  Ram goes out of the bedroom to the guest bathroom for his shower and his shave. After breakfast, he calls the hotel to confirm the reservations. In the afternoon, he sleeps for an hour and plays solitaire for two.

  When Ram left for his graduate degree in the United States, he also left Sara behind in India. Her parents couldn’t afford the plane ticket and so she couldn’t go to America even though she had a fellowship for a master’s degree for a full two years. She found a job instead at a local company. When they broke up, it was almost as if she had expected it.

  “You’re going, aren’t you?” she had said.

  “And when I come back …” Ram shrugged. “Sorry.”

  “You aren’t really coming back,” she said. “I’m sorry too. I thought I knew you, Ram. But I think I know you only too well.” And then she said, most astonishingly to him, “Good luck. With everything.”

  He had been almost shocked by those words. He had never needed luck in his life. He had money. He could not marry her because he would marry money. Dating in college was fine, but marriage … it was a practical institution. His mother had married his father for a reason, well, several, of which could be counted money, power, family name, and some itinerant dabbling in local politics that also translated into money, power, and family name. His uncles and aunts had done the same. His sister was already married to a shifty-eyed man who could not keep his pants zipped. But he had money … and the rest of it.

  When Ram, Sat, and Vish returned to India, they started to work in their parents’ companies. Ram’s mother had told him that he must work for at least a year before he could get married, and he agreed. It was his time for freedom. When the year passed, his mother brought Sita to the house one evening with her parents. They were of old money. And their wealth came from property—a hundred thousand acres of prime, arable land in the delta of the state’s biggest river; irrigation was never a problem, there was plenty of water, and there were no fickle monsoons to rely upon. They had a sprawling house at one edge of the property, with brilliant green lawns, lush palm trees, peacocks in the gardens. They had three hundred in-house servants.

  But for that walk, that stumbling, childlike walk, Sita was beautiful. She was fair, she had huge eyes, she had dimpled elbows with smooth, smooth skin. She had three sisters, all younger than her, and the moment Ram and Sita married, two more were married off to equally prosperous sons-in-law.

  Ram and Sita had their first child twelve months after the wedding, the second came along three years later. Both were boys. By the fifth year of their marriage, Sita had lost ten kilos, played tennis with the marker at the Gymkhana Club, spoke English fluently (more fluently than she had before in her country and village upbringing), and learned to walk toward and away from the members of the Key Club without tripping once in three-inch-heels from Italy.

  That was a few years before the Key Club was formed.

  The only time Ram ever felt a want, or perhaps a betrayal, was the year that he had returned home to India to work at his mother’s company as a (beginning) Managing Director. The year he was to wait until his mother found him Sita. He had thought about Sara a lot in the first few months, wondered where she was, if she was married, to whom, what she looked like now … if her singing voice sounded the same. And then, a few months later, he had come upon her in a restaurant, clad in a lavish silk sari, a necklace of diamonds around her neck, diamonds in her ears, gold bangles tumbling down her slender arm. Her eyebrows were cleanly arched above eyes that sparkled—contact lenses, Ram thought, why had she not worn them in college?

  He rose from his table and went to greet her, and felt a sense of shock as the man seated next to her turned and showed him a laughing profile as he touched Sara upon the shoulder with a settled hand. It was too intimate a gesture in public for it to mean anything other than what it was. That man was her husband. And that man was Sat.

  “Dude!” Sat said, turning to him. “I married her, you see? You left her, I married her.”

  And he had always wanted her, Ram thought. Even when Ram and Sara had been dating. Though not once, and he cast his mind back deliberately to ponder on this, not once had there been even an ounce of impropriety in Sat’s behavior toward Sara when they were in college. But since, yes, since there had been.

  They told him of their two-year correspondence through letters, emails, and phone calls when Ram, Sat, and Vish had been in the United States. Sara mentioned the trip to Yellowstone, the photos of them in front of enormous brown bison, their backs to the animals as they posed with fingers splayed in a V for victory sign. “How silly of you,” she said. “You might have been gored if the bison had so chosen.”

  Silly, Ram thought. He had been silly. He wondered then if she had felt a pang of longing when she saw him in the photos, or if he had been let go as easily as … he had let go of her. But standing there, looking down upon the two of them, married a mere six months, Ram knew that he had been not just silly, but outrageously stupid. He was in love with Sara. But still, the Key Club, when it came into being, was not Ram’s idea, but Sat’s.

  Ram and Sita drive t
o the hotel in silence. They leave the children in the middle of a fight—between the two of them, that is—and leave the maid to sort it out, to hush their tears, to feed them their dinner and put them to bed. As it is almost every evening whether they are at home or not. As it was, Ram thinks as they wait for a light to turn green, when he was growing up. His mother always wore her hair short, a boy-cut they called it then, and now. Clipped around her ears, a razor edge at the back, a slop of hair over her forehead. One of the things he had been grateful for in both Sara and Sita was that they had long, old-fashioned hair, in Sara’s case, hitting the back of her knees. Sita has long since cut her hair to fall just below her shoulders, layered and styled into loose waves. Tonight, she wears a simple pink chiffon sari, a wisp of a blouse with two strings across the back, silver high heels, and a pair of silver hoops in her ears.

  Pink Floyd’s “Money” booms softly on the car’s CD player. Ram feels like singing along, but he is quiet. And then Sita says, “Why did you ever form this damned club?”

  He brakes suddenly and horns blast out at him. The windows are rolled up against the summer night, but he can still hear an autorickshaw driver as he leans out from under the canvas awning of his vehicle and shouts, “Yo, did ya warn them at home before you left, stupid?”

  A common slang-curse—did you tell your dear ones before you left home that you were planning on dying today? Stupid.

  “A damned club?” he says. “You seem to like it well enough.”

  “And so do you.”

  Yes, he thinks. “Who will you …” He stops, unable to ask anything further, and sees a little smile lift the edges of her mouth. It is that smile, that non-smile, that knowing light in her eyes when she does this that made Sat want to form the club.

  A couple of years ago, the eight of them had gone out for dinner at a gentlemen’s lounge. They had watched as the slender, black-clad waitresses had leaned over their shoulders to place plates in front of them, cleared the food away, brought them more drinks, asked if they wanted anything else. As the evening progressed the women seemed to touch them more often, a sliding rub on the shoulder, a bump from a toned hip, a flip of long, straight hair.

  Sat had said, a bemused look on his face, “There’s no one quite like your wife though, Ram. You’re a lucky bastard.”

  The others, Vish especially, had agreed, raising their glasses in a silent toast.

  “So are you,” Ram had said. “You married the girl I love.”

  In the present tense, and he thought they all realized it, but no one said anything.

  And then Sat began a story about some friends of his in Mumbai who had formed something called a Key Club. The waitresses disappeared, the room grew quiet.

  “What is the one thing we do not have?” Sat said. “The one thing money cannot buy for us? Something to think about, isn’t it?”

  They did. They thought about it that night when they returned home to their sleeping wives and children, to hushed houses, to clocks that chimed the hour. Ram called Sat the next morning and said that he was in. Over the next few days they all called Sat. Although they were to be the members of the club, it could not exist without their wives’ consent. It took a year for all of the wives to agree. Sita was the last to submit. The club had met three times so far. Tonight is the fourth meeting.

  There was one rule that had to be followed with diligence. The wives must not be influenced in their decisions; they must make their own picks, and they must be the ones to choose. Unsaid, and critical to the longevity of the club, was that the members of the club must accept whatever happened at the club meeting, and never talk about it.

  “Why, Ram?” Sita asks again in the car as they approach the hotel.

  So he tells her. And then, “Why ask now, Sita? You’ve been happy enough the last three times.”

  He lets that slip without meaning to, and remembers now that Sita had glowed on every post–Key Club meeting Sunday. Oddly, to Ram, because he would never have thought that Vish … if anything, it was Sat he was afraid of. Sat who had first said that Sita was lovely, Sat who had come up with the idea of the club, who hoped each time that he would be picked. Sat who had married the woman Ram is in love with. And on each occasion as the time for the picking came, there were two thoughts that warred constantly in Ram. Who would choose him, and who Sita would choose. Not Sat, he thought each time, not Sat.

  “Ram and Sita,” Sat says as they enter the private dinner lounge at the hotel. “You are late.”

  They are all there. All sixteen of them with their made-up names—so that they can be tonight what they aren’t in their real lives. Ram chose their names for the Key Club after Ram and Sita from the Ramayana. A funny choice, Sita had said once, didn’t Ram exile his wife to the jungle when she was pregnant with twins for the mere suspicion that she might have been unfaithful to him? And she had gone through an Agni-Pariksha, a literal trial by fire, walked through fire and come out unscathed to prove to him that she was still pure, still untouched by Ravana. What a fickle man he was, Sita had said. Funny you would choose his name for yours.

  Ram hadn’t thought that far into the story, of course. In his mind was a brief memory from when he was ten years old, peering around the door of the drawing room late one night during a party his parents had hosted, and Vish’s father had passed behind his mother’s chair and stroked her back with his gin and tonic glass. Ram’s mother had shivered and bowed her head. Ram knew, and knew this with certainty only many years later, that Vish’s father and his mother had been having an affair. What his father thought of this, or if he even knew or cared, Ram did not know. So when the club was formed, he changed their names to Ram and Sita—Ram who had fought the demon king Ravana who had captured his wife, rescued her, and brought her home with him safely. A few years later the god Ram had let his wife go, but Ram really hadn’t thought that far into the story.

  They are subdued tonight, the laughter is almost nonexistent, and they eat in silence, forks clinking on china plates. The lights dim when they finish eating. All the men reach into their pockets and bring out their car keys. Sometime, earlier in the evening, a waiter set a clear, cut-glass bowl in the center of the table, and all through dinner it sits sparkling in the muted light.

  There are eight rooms booked upstairs in the hotel— each identical, dark teak furniture, creamy white bedspreads, a view to the blue-green swimming pool and the lawns. Eight rooms, and there are eight card keys on the table now, which Vish removed from an envelope and fanned out over the table. He then deposits his car keys into the bowl. Ram does the same, and watches as Sat puts his keys in also. Sat glances at Sita, but she is looking at the mirrored surface of the table and not at him.

  The women draw lots from another envelope. Sita’s number is seven. By the time her turn comes, Sara has already picked up Vy’s car keys from the cut-glass bowl, and the only two women remaining are Sita and Alistair’s wife. Sat and Vish are still unclaimed.

  Ram’s head throbs. Not Sat, he thinks. Don’t pick Sat. The last three times, Sita chose Vish’s keys—chose to go with him and the card key to a room upstairs, chose to spend all of that Saturday night with him. She came back home the next day lit from within with an inner fire of satisfaction. But it is Sat who wants Sita, who is so desperate to sleep with Ram’s wife that he forms the club just for this chance that she might choose him also. Sat who stole Sara from Ram, and married her instead. Not Sat, please.

  Sita reaches into the bowl, and her fingertips glow pink through the glass. When her hand comes out, she holds Vish’s keys.

  Bedside Dreams

  I watch as Parvati bends over Kamal, lifting his arm to tuck the sheet around his body. Her movements are gentle, as though she takes care of a child. She smoothes the fabric over him, then reaches out to even the hair on his forehead. Her fingers linger on the side of his still face, as if to absorb his warmth. She does this for me, I know, for then she looks up and winks. I smile slowly as she leaves the room. My gaze
comes back to Kamal and pain scuttles inside me. This once-vibrant man is an empty shape lying on pale sheets that overpower his skin. Veins stand out on the fragile face I once covered with kisses. Somewhere in the chest a tentative breath catches his lungs, fills them briefly, and then flees.

  I remember leaning over my first daughter a few days after her birth to check if she was breathing. My fingers would meet the little throb on the side of her head, or I would hold my hand in front of her nose as her little breath condensed on my palm. This I did every night, many many times, waking from a deep sleep, feeling I must go to her. For Kamal, the man who gave me that daughter, I cannot do this. I can only watch over him. I can only guard him, knowing that inevitably one day even that shallow rise and fall of his ribs will stop.

  This will last for a long time, they say. Why wait like this? Why stand vigil over an already empty bed? Do you notice, as you go through life, how many people think they have a say in it? How many people give you advice for various useless reasons? They’ve lived longer; they know better; they are just smarter. I, who have known this man more precisely than anyone else, can tell he will not last long. Until then, I will be here, by his side. And then he will be gone, his life extinguished after eighty-three years, sixty-seven of which we spent together, never apart for more than three days at a stretch.

  I cannot talk to Kamal and I know he cannot hear me. In any case, we don’t need words anymore. A glance, a raised eyebrow, a smile, these are enough for us to communicate with after so many years of marriage; and in the early, turbulent years, we rarely had the time for talk anyway. When I was pregnant with our first daughter, I spent one night in jail for demonstrating on the streets the night the Indian Congress passed the Quit India resolution. 1942. I was sixteen years old. As we demanded the British leave India, they swept us haphazardly into overfull prisons. By the next morning, they had started culling us out. I was let go first, my stomach round with the child, my face blanched from a sleepless night. Kamal, president of the local chapter of the Congress, had to stay in jail. Freed, he would create problems, for outside our little realm, beyond our burning purpose, the whole world raged in war.