In the Convent of Little Flowers

by Indu Sundaresan

  The phone rings. I know who it is. This time I pick it up.

  “Nitu.” Her voice is soft. “Please don’t hang up. Please.”

  I wait. I am trembling, suddenly longing to hear more of her voice.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  I shake my head. As though she is at fault. We both … we both. But she cannot see me, of course.

  “Let me come to see you. I can take an hour off at lunch.”

  “Why?”

  “Let me come,” she says.

  I put the phone down carefully and go and sit on the sofa, my sofa. One of the things I can claim in this flat, and my parents gave it to me.

  The noon hour passes slowly. Each time I hear the lift doors open, I think it is her. Each time I stand, waiting for the doorbell to ring. I see her face in my mind. See her smile. Ache for that kiss. Then I know she is not coming, that somehow, in talking to her, I have driven her away.

  At four o’ clock the children return home. They eat what I make for them, they drink their milk. They go into their rooms and shut the doors, the flat is empty again. I wait for Prakrit. Every day these last two months he comes home and says, Ashok got promoted, Vivek got promoted, Shekar is going to the United States—this last with a shameful downward glance. We do not talk much of America anymore, not after …

  The last four days we are to spend together after the honeymoon pass, then another four, and four weeks. Prakrit is still in India. We live with his parents, two kilometers from my parents’ house. My mother asks when he is going; she does this in soft whispers when he is not present. I ask him too, but get no real response. Soon, he says, when his visa comes through. There is some problem. Then he tells me he is changing jobs, so the new company has to process his papers. I wonder about my own visa, but I am not to worry, he will take care of everything.

  The longer we stay in India, the more Laila’s mother starts to smile. She comes to visit my mother often, with news of Laila’s marriage to a boy from a very good family, much land and property in India and—the final insult to my mother—he studied for his MS degree in America and works for a software company. The months pass, Laila marries and leaves almost immediately for California. Her first parcel to her mother contains three bottles of perfume with bold-sounding names, all of which smudge the air in our house after Laila’s mother’s visits. Finally, six months after the wedding, Prakrit tells me the truth.

  His visa had expired long before he came back to India to get married. There is no chance of his returning, but his parents would not let that become common knowledge before the wedding. It would have wrecked their claims to Prakrit’s eligibility, and demolished the dowry he could command. There is little I can do about the lies. At the beginning I am furious, but my father tells me to go back to my husband and not make any trouble, it was hard enough to get me married. I do. Prakrit looks for a job, and finds one on a probationary status in Mumbai. I am glad to move away from the city where I lived all my life to the anonymity and crowds of Mumbai. Fourteen years ago.

  Prakrit comes home, pounding on the doorbell as usual. He looks tired and goes to sit at the table without a glance. He drinks his chai, eats his pakoras, asks where Sunny and Dinesh are. I watch in silence. He talks. Something about another promotion for someone else, not him.

  “That color does not suit you,” he says.

  I look down at the yellow salwar-kameez I am wearing. I fan the chiffon dupatta over my dark fingers. I am suddenly angry. For years he has told me what to wear, how to wear it, how to sit and talk. As though he lives inside my skin. For years I have let him do this. Because there is no other way. Because this is all I have, or so I have been taught. In the end, it comes down to this. If not an America-return boy, at least one who is fair of skin, who has a job, whose job gives us this flat in Mumbai. But it no longer seems enough. Ten, twenty years from now I see us at this table. The children are gone to their own homes and families. I see us sitting here in silence. I see Prakrit telling me, as my hair grays and wrinkles map my face, what to wear.

  “It suited me fine when you came to view me,” I say.

  He smiles. “No, it did not. But I had already decided to marry you, so the color did not matter.”

  “Why, Prakrit?” I ask. “Why did you marry me? There were others you could have chosen from.” It is the first time I have questioned the lie, and his face reddens in rage.

  “Let me see if I can explain it to you in terms you will understand, Nitu,” he says, leaning back in his chair with a grin. “I had to choose—my parents and I had to choose— a girl without brothers who would kick up a fuss when I didn’t return to the United States, and a father who would ignore her. When did your father ever look up from that damned newspaper that he reads in his chair each day to see what was happening around him?”

  “What a bastard you are, Prakrit,” I say.

  He raises his eyebrows. “Don’t talk too much, Nitu. Where are Sunny and Dinesh? Why haven’t they come to say hello to me?”

  He turns away, already dismissive.

  “I’m leaving, Prakrit.”

  His head whips around. “Where are you going? To visit your parents? Not this month. Perhaps later.”

  Even this is familiar. He does not want me here because he wants me here. But because I am a fixture in this flat. A wife. A symbol of status.

  “I’m not coming back.”

  His eyes grow cold. “What?”

  I am too tired to talk, to give explanations. And he is not worth it. A few minutes ago the music from Sunny’s room stopped, and she stands in the corridor, chewing that omnipresent gum. Dinesh hides behind her, his gaze steady on the two of us.

  “What will you do, Nitu? Where will you go, to your parents? They will never take you back.”

  This I know. My mother would be horrified and I will be told my shadow must never again fall across their front door. This I know. I am terrified, molten with fear, but so determined. So sure I must do this so twenty years from now I do not sit across the table from him. So I can live.

  I put my hand out to the children and they come with a confidence they have never before shown in me. Sunny comes to beyond my shoulders, yet she leans her head on my chest. Dinesh puts his arms around my waist. I am almost suffocated by his grip.

  “Get out,” Prakrit says. “Get the fucking hell out.” His voice is triumphant. Because he thinks I will be coming back.

  Sunny clutches at my dupatta, wiping her nose on it as she used to when she was a baby. We move together to the front door, open it. I stand there looking at Prakrit, but he is pouring himself a whiskey from the sideboard, another requirement on the list his mother gave my parents. It took our carpenter two days to make and cost more than my wedding saris. As we stand there, Prakrit comes up to us, and with one hand pushes us out just beyond the door. Then he shuts it gently. I hear him say, “Don’t come back until you are ready to beg forgiveness. On your hands and knees.”

  I stand in the little landing with the three flat doors branching out. The lift light comes on and the door opens. Sheela steps out. She looks at us standing there, the children sticking to my side. Then she opens her arms. Sunny and Dinesh fly to her. I wonder why, they don’t even know her. But they step into her circle of warmth. She lifts Dinesh and straddles him on one hip. He is heavy. He is eight, not a child anymore, but now he suddenly is.

  I am crying. Tears drench the collar of my kameez, my nose runs.

  “Come,” Sheela says. “Come.”

  I stare at her. How did this happen? How did one day’s worth of emotions, two months ago, change my whole life? How will we shatter two families, shatter every social code and more we have known? How?

  “Come,” she says again.

  I go.

  Afterword

  A few years ago, Seattle magazine, our local monthly, called for submissions for its second annual fiction competition. One of their (not unreasonable) conditions was that the story have some “Seattle” connec
tion, either in setting, or characters who once found their homes here, or something—they were very generous.

  Having decided to submit for the competition, for the first time in my writing career I had to write a story to fit a specific theme and a market. This Seattle story of mine wasn’t an easy task, for the simple reason that until then all my fiction—novels and short stories—had been set in India. I had completed both The Twentieth Wife and The Feast of Roses, both set in seventeenth-century Mughal India, and had written numerous contemporary short stories, drawing on my experiences from my childhood and college years. It was a daunting task, all of a sudden. I had no wish then (and now) to write about the immigrant Indian experience—I was living the life and didn’t feel I had lived it long enough to sit back, draw a breath, and view my experiences with a writer’s eye, from all sides, prejudiced and not.

  I began and let waste a couple of short stories because they were going nowhere; the characters seemed flat, the voice insipid, the plot sluggish. When the weekend came around, my husband and I went to dinner at an Indian friend’s home. At the table, our hostess began a story about one of her colleagues at work. My friend’s colleague had just received a call from her sister in Belgium, married to a Belgian man, who had adopted a little girl from India (actually the city of Chennai) some twenty-odd years ago. A few days before, a letter had come to them from the orphanage at Chennai, with the request that the girl come back to India to see her mother who was dying. The Belgian parents, and their now-Belgian daughter, had not returned to India after the adoption and knew no Indians at all. So the mother’s phone call to her sister (and my friend’s colleague) in Seattle was to ask her to find out from my friend if she thought if the letter was legitimate, if they should indeed go to see this woman who had given up her child to the orphanage … if …

  My friend has a mobile face and a rhythm to her voice, especially suited for storytelling. She can mimic and mime, be grave and irreverent in turn, but I was, at best, a preoccupied audience that evening. The dinner ended, we went home and to bed, and I worried myself to sleep. The next morning, I awoke and began to write “Shelter of Rain.”

  I wrote steadily over the next three days, let the story rest for another three, and revised for another three days before I sent it in to Seattle magazine. A few weeks later, they returned the story to me with thanks and their regrets—they had decided to cancel their second annual fiction competition. All that fretting for nothing! But I still had my Seattle story, after all.

  Sometime before this, I had picked up a copy of India Today, India’s weekly news magazine, at the local library and remember staring at the cover picture for a long while— it was a photo of a gray-haired man and woman lying on the concrete pavement where they had fallen. They looked peaceful, almost asleep, faces turned to the side, but a ribbon of blood zigzagged out from the man’s head onto the concrete. When I eventually turned to the accompanying article, it was to read about (my) Meha and Chandar and their son, (my) Bikaner, and how they had flung themselves from the balcony of their flat to stop their son’s abuse. Neighbors said that it was because the son wanted the flat they owned in Mumbai. This is about all of what I remember from the article.

  It took me months of thinking about Meha and Chandar and Bikaner, of who they were, where they came from, why … why … why … before I could write “Three and a Half Seconds.”

  From the first writing of the story, I had structured it around the jump, and my initial title, chosen for no reason, was “Nine and a Half Seconds.” Optimistically, as it turned out. With a great deal of help (such terminology not being part of my normal vocabulary), I calculated the coefficient of friction for a falling human body, the drag (or lack of it, since it was warm weather and they would not have been clad in cumbersome clothing), whether they would reach terminal velocity (no, not enough of a height), a more reasonable distance for them to fall (from the sixteenth floor), and the title was pared down to “Three and a Half Seconds.” This is one of my early stories—I think it might predate all the stories in this collection—but it is the most difficult story I have written.

  Most Indian readers will probably recognize the premise of “The Faithful Wife.” I read this story of a Sati in my local newspaper, while drinking my coffee, just before leaving for college in the late 1980s. It was a little article, tucked away into a corner reserved for late-breaking news as the paper is being put to bed for the night. Since, of course, the Deorala Sati and Roop Kanwar have been written about, discussed, and analyzed. But I wrote “The Faithful Wife” from that one memory of that little article, so my facts (my fiction, really) aren’t accurate (and they aren’t meant to be), other than the fact of the Sati taking place. I remembered that a reporter had arrived at Deorala the morning after, and this reporter (my Ram) became the focus of “The Faithful Wife.” What would he have done if he had arrived just before the event? What would he have done if his grandparents lived in the village—if they were somehow complicit in the Sati?

  There is some background, such as these, in all the stories of In the Convent of Little Flowers. A tale told over dinner, an article read in a newspaper, even a much-forwarded email with a “can you believe this is happening in India?” as in the case of “The Key Club.” Everything triggers a thought, some thinking; sometimes this develops into a story, if I can find enough of a motivation and conjure up a history. Sometimes, as in the case of “The Chosen One,” I set out to write another story and this is what I ended up with.

  It’s easier to cram only craziness and eccentricity in a short story rather than a novel—there it would be simply exhausting. Novels need lulls, breathing spaces. In the short story, the lull comes afterward, when the story has been read and put away and there is time for reflection. So if there’s one thing the stories have in common, it is that they all deal with that intense moment in which people confront disturbing events in their lives. I didn’t put these stories together with a theme in mind, and there is none really, I think, other than perhaps my reminiscences, old and new, of my homeland.

  Indu Sundaresan

  January 2008

  Acknowledgments

  This collection was created over a period of some years; consequently, I’ve shown the stories, in one avatar or another, to members of my critique groups. Thank you, for your thoughts, questions and comments, which have helped shape these stories into their current form.

  My agent, Sandy Dijkstra, has a steady and wise guiding hand, and everyone at the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency is brilliant and efficient—it’s such a pleasure working with all of you.

  It has been awhile, eight years or so, but I still remember that stunning happiness on hearing that Judith Curr, my publisher at Atria Books, had agreed to publish my first novel. I’ve worked with Malaika Adero, my editor at Atria Books, only a few years less, and I’m grateful to both of you for your support and encouragement, especially with this book, which is something new from my pen. My deepest thanks also to the Copyediting Department at Atria (for stellar copyediting), the Art Department (for spectacular covers), and the Publicity Department (for believing in my work and championing it to the outside world).

  To Uday and Sitara: just this; you make all of this, and indeed everything else in my life, worthwhile.

  Finally, a note to readers around the world, who have written in to keep me company with their stories and had kind words of praise for mine—I appreciate your letters more than I can express.

  Readers Club Guide

  In the Convent of Little Flowers

  Introduction

  In this collection of stories, celebrated author Indu Sundaresan departs from her body of historical novels to explore themes of significance to Indians today. These nine works of short fiction tell the stories of contemporary Indians challenged by ancient traditions and culture, struggling to find a place and a way of life in a world that offers some women more opportunities than ever while denying others even the most basic freedoms. With Sundaresan
’s trademark lush prose, vividly rendered settings, complex and appealing characters, and compelling narratives, In the Convent of Little Flowers illuminates the lives of Indian women living at home and abroad, embracing and rejecting modern lives.

  Questions and Topics for Discussion

  1. In “Shelter of Rain,” why is Padmini so angry to hear from Sister Mary Theresa, the woman who practically raised her until her adoption at age six? What reasons does the nun give Padmini for her mother’s abandonment and neglect? How does Padmini feel about those reasons? Do you sympathize with her mother at all?

  2. Indian culture has long emphasized the importance of respect for elders, particularly with regard to aging parents. In “Three and a Half Seconds” and “Bedside Dreams,” we witness the devastating effects of the rejection of this tradition. Why do Meha and Chandar ultimately choose death over asking for help or standing up to their cruel son, Bikaner? What does “Bedside Dreams” say about the effect of Western culture on young Indians with elderly parents? Do you think the nameless narrator and her husband, Kamal, did in fact “go wrong” raising their twelve children to be cast off so readily?

  3. Compare and contrast the way Payal’s grandmother in “Fire” and Kamal and his wife in “Bedside Dreams” are treated. Describe the situations these elderly characters face at the end of their lives and explain how they got there. Do you think they deserve their fates? Why or why not?

  4. Banyan trees appear in several of the stories in this collection. Identify which stories this symbol appears in and discuss the ways in which the characters use the banyan tree. What do you think the tree symbolizes?