The print slipped from Nina’s hand and fluttered to the damp floor, barely missing the maidservant’s green plastic bucket of water.
There lay the story of an aborted relationship.
Would Sujata ever be able to forgive her?
With a queasy sensation in the pit of her stomach, Nina bent down and strained to reach the photo, but her hand stopped short.
Reenu stooped to retrieve the photo. “You’re shivering. Let me get you a shawl.”
“Yes, a shawl, that’d be nice.”
Nina was still shivering when Reenu’s strong lean hands tucked the fleecy heat of a pashmina shawl around her shoulders. To mask her disconsolate sigh, Nina pretended to sniff the lingering scent of neem leaves that had protected the wrap through months of storage. She must somehow get Sujata and Mreenal to meet and perhaps marry. By doing so, Nina might be able to put things right.
Her silence must have disconcerted Reenu, for she said, “Are you sure you’re not sick, Thakurma? Should I call the doctor?”
“Quite sure.” Nina drew her gaze up, then away quickly, for fear of betraying her distressed mental state to the maidservant. “It’s just that I’ve made decisions that I will always regret.”
“I don’t know much of anything, Thakurma, I went to school only up to class four. I didn’t like going to school.”
“We’re like rivers, Reenu. We tumble toward the ocean, our destiny, until the obstacle of a powerful desire tries to change our course. Then we flood to regain our direction and finally pour ourselves into our great master.”
“Very wise. I can learn a lot from you.”
“I low old are you, Reenu?”
“I am eighteen, maybe nineteen, I don’t know for sure. My mother can’t remember what year I was born. She had eight children. And in those days, a birth certificate wasn’t required.”
“Is your mother going to find you a husband?”
“I have found a man myself.”
“Who’s he?”
“He’s a bus boy at Hasty Tasty. I don’t see him much during the week, but on Sundays he takes me to Rink Cinema. I put on my best cotton sari and all my glass bangles. At intermission I eat a paan and he smokes a bidi. He explains to me what I don’t understand in the story.”
“For my birthday, I’ll buy you a silk sari, Reenu. What color do you prefer?”
“A silk sari? Oh, Thakurma, I’ve never worn silk. I have only touched it. You’re so very kind. I like bluish green, if that’s not too much trouble.”
Ah, aqua. Nina reflected that she, too, liked colors that fused into each other. “You must invite your man for my birthday celebration and introduce him to me.”
“But Thakurma … what will people say? We’re not of your class.”
“Don’t worry about people. I want to see at least two cheerful faces that evening.”
twenty
Aloka rode the elevator to her sixth-floor office. In an instant the uniform cubicles beneath the sterile, vanilla-shade walls, the clacking keyboards, and the jangling telephones obliterated her distress over the love letter. Cheerfully she threw herself into today’s assignment of writing a thousand-word piece on India’s booming information technology, the so-called IT industry. She had just begun laying out the position of India’s domestic computer makers who sought an easing of government regulations when she was startled by the thud of an object falling. Her assistant had dropped a bulky packet of mail in her in-tray. Usually she glanced at the mail with curiosity and eagerness. Not today, the sight of any letter tormented her.
Once again the Sujata-Pranab liaison loomed large in her consciousness, giving rise to an ongoing inner dialogue with herself:
How long had Pranab been writing to Sujata? How much did Sujata still mean to him? It all boiled down to one existential question: Was Sujata the real cause of the breakup of their marriage?
If so, and if Sujata and Pranab were to reunite, would they become lovers again, now that both were free?
As she turned the questions over in her mind, Aloka summoned up a few sentences from an article she’d recently written: “Inherent in any migration is a loss of certainty about the self, a hardening of the spirit, the walling off of a section of the heart. Immigrants pine for a way of life forever lost, but they also forget. They do so to survive.”
Now that Sujata and Pranab lived in a cold, unfeeling new world geared to speed and efficiency, their old love would likely be hopelessly dated and adolescent. But then, Aloka hadn’t explored another possibility in her article. What happens when immigrants return to their homeland? Do they regain their lost self? In other words, could the magic of Darjeeling possibly rekindle the passion between Pranab and Sujata?
The letter would have the answers. Except that Aloka couldn’t remember a single complete sentence now. However painful that might be, she needed to read the letter again.
The next few hours agonized her, even as putting “The End” at the conclusion of the article gave her a sense of satisfaction. She even managed to finish answering all her phone calls by the end of the day. She sprang up, donned her trench coat, picked up her purse, and vowed to read—no, dissect—that cursed letter as soon as she returned home.
On the way home, convinced that she would need all her strength for the upcoming ordeal, she got off the subway and headed for her favorite bakery on Fifty-fourth Street and Third Avenue. There she purchased a dozen freshly baked Pleasure Dome cookies.
Her next stop was at the delicatessen on Fifty-third and Second Avenue. The cramped store bustled with evening shoppers. Entering, she bumped into an Indian man of medium height and unremarkable features who was busy inspecting a ripe yellow papaya. He seemed vaguely familiar, though she couldn’t recall where she’d seen him before. As he regarded her, his eyes seemed to broaden in recognition mingled with a frank appraisal. Aloka felt blood flowing to her cheeks. Back home, as a young unmarried woman, she had worn her beauty—which she believed was nothing more than inner serenity—easily, as unconsciously as if it were her prerogative. She’d believed that somehow she’d lost her looks, her serene expression, when Pranab left her. That might not have been the case.
She muttered an apology, a few seconds later than was appropriate, and retreated to the salad bar, where she hastily scooped out some kasha varnishkas into a plastic bowl. She needed something substantial to fill her suddenly growling stomach. Moments later she hastened out the door, a plastic bag dangling from her hand, relieved by the dark anonymity of New York.
She walked past a Japanese-run beauty salon and an English-as-a-second-language school, finally arriving at the entrance to her apartment building. Abruptly, she halted. Pranab was sitting at the top of the concrete stoop, engrossed in a paperback.
He must have sensed her presence, for he now sprang up. “Aloka! I thought I’d come early.”
Just this once why couldn’t he have been late? She mumbled something about this being perfectly okay, then unlocked the door, realizing she was falling back into her old habit of deferring to him. Aloka, ever the understanding one, the one who absorbed life’s little shocks so Pranab could go about his day unruffled.
Now, with no further attempt at social amenities, he slipped past her and headed for the bedroom. Trailing in his wake, she watched the hurried steps of his chestnut loafers. He paused at the dresser, while she folded her arms and leaned against the doorjamb. Bending, he rummaged through the drawers with focused eyes. How could he do this? He hadn’t used those drawers in the last six months and they held her personal articles. Anger swelled inside her, but with a struggle she froze her face into a mask of tranquillity.
He glanced at her over his shoulder and mumbled, “Not there.”
Her eyes caught a blemish on his chin, perhaps a cut from shaving this morning. “Where could you have put what’s not there?”
He opened the closet door and grabbed his sweater. The wooden hanger made a somber noise, even as it slid over the rod. He made a further show of
peering hard into the closet’s shadows. Then, acting as though a revelation had occurred to him, exclaimed, “Oh, I know.” With that he lowered himself to the floor next to the bed, reached under, and pulled out the envelope.
She shifted her gaze. That wretched letter beneath their marriage bed.
He briskly stood up, then exhaled with, “I have no idea how it got there.”
She spun around and flew out of the bedroom, feigning calmness, though a tension was claiming her back. Pranab trailed after her.
At the apartment door he asked innocently, even amiably, “Have you heard from home lately?”
He had the gall to ask about her family? Still she spoke with a quiet gentleness. “I got an invitation. Grandma’s eighty-first birthday is coming up in November and she wants me to be present at the festivity. Of course I’m going. By the way, she mentioned you twice in her letter.”
He adjusted his glasses and ran his fingers over the front plume of his hair, a telltale sign that he was pondering the matter with some concern. “Did she invite your whole family?”
She stared at the tarnished brass-coated doorknob. “If Grandma has her way, she’ll get Sujata to attend, too.”
She watched Pranab’s reaction minutely. He was hugging the sweater to his chest, taking some pleasure doing so. “How nice, two sisters together again! Well, my cousin Babli is getting married in November. She’d love to see me there. I have to check with my boss, but the timing seems right.” Then, animatedly, “I’ll make every attempt to attend Babli’s wedding and Thakurma’s birthday.”
His enthusiastic response crushed her. The Guptas were still unaware of their divorce. How would they take it when she and Pranab arrive in Darjeeling separately? They would have to come up with a coordinated strategy to disclose the news. Before she could broach the subject, he slipped out through the door with a furtive glance at her and a mumbled good-bye. In quick motions he retreated down the steps, his loafers slapping the stairs, while she stood there dazed, her sensibilities too bruised to carry on.
After a while she went back to her evening chores—ironing a suit, watering the geraniums, paying the bills. She did these routine tasks with half her mind, though in the end they stabilized her. Finally, as she practiced singing—several Rabindrasangeets—and, giving voice to her emotions, she saw the path ahead more clearly. With Pranab also returning to Darjeeling, there was hope of reconciliation. She could easily visualize taking a stroll with him through Darjeeling’s vibrant streets: curio shops displaying turquoise amulets, a purveyor pushing a cartload of lychee ice cream, flute music breaking the pure high-altitude air, and Pranab gazing deeply into her eyes and repeating what he’d said shortly after they first met. “You’re a country, Aloka. I see a beautiful, mysterious landscape in your face, full lips, and velvet hair.” He would smile like the sun mounting over the Kanchenjunga. And they would return to their once-pure relationship.
twenty-one
The top of the flip chart read: “How many cups of tea do North Americans drink per year?” Just below it on the graph paper, Suzy inscribed a rising curve, then jotted the answer: “Over 50 billion cups annually. More than 90% is black tea.”
Her assistant Jane appeared and motioned her aside. “A Mr. Mreenal Bose is on the phone. He says it’s personal.”
Bose, a Bengali name, grabbed Suzy’s interest. Like other Indian expatriates, she could make a pretty good guess as to an Indian’s ethnic origin and mother tongue from a surname. Mreenal Bose most likely spoke Bengali. Also, there was a Bose family in Darjeeling, she now recalled.
“Please ask him to call back.”
“He says he’s in town just for the day.”
“Ask him to try back this afternoon, then.”
Suzy turned her attention back to her clients. In trying to make up for the lagging sales of last quarter, she emphasized that she had added new tea varieties, such as black tea bound up with the essence of jasmine, blackberry, or rose petals, as well as an assortment of herbals, which combined herbs, roots, bark, and seeds. The clients pored over the numbers and asked questions about her tea’s caffeine content. Suzy reassured them that a cup of black tea contained only about fifty milligrams of caffeine, compared with the average hundred in a cup of coffee. That drew a rebuttal from a retailer, a purist who owned Fruit Juice Forever, and in whose opinion fifty milligrams measured a lot. Suzy didn’t mind responding with facts about other benefits of black tea—its antioxidant and automutagenic properties. She fought the battle against coffee and other beverages one client at a time. In another hour, the meeting was over.
She plowed through the rest of the day, contacting a distributor, planning for the next Tea Council Conference, and checking inventory. After lunch she finalized the design of a new package, hoping that would spur sales. She chose a puncture-resistant box with an ersatz wood-grain finish and a new marketing phrase: “The taste only quality can bring.” The lettering would be done in red, green, and yellow, the colors associated with tea. At the end of the day, it dawned on her that Mreenal Bose still hadn’t called back. Who was he anyway?
On the way home, she stopped at Far and Away, a travel agency that she had looked at wistfully for years. It took two exhausting hours to finalize her trip, at the end of which she got into her car with a round-trip ticket to India and a mood of elation and started toward her apartment.
It was nearly eight P.M. when she parked at the garage of her apartment building on Beach Drive. A blast of salty ocean air and the consistent splash of waves dissipated her fatigue. She shuffled to the mailbox and emptied its contents on her way to the third floor.
Once inside her apartment, she threw the mail on the coffee table: gas bill, a free latte coupon, a Damart catalog, and a personal letter. She picked up the letter, glanced at the return address, and … oh, Bhagowan … her fingers went limp.
Why would Pranab write?
And from Brooklyn?
Had they moved?
In a previous correspondence, Aloka had described Manhattan as “the best and the worst of man; marvelous.” Reading that, Suzy had believed Aloka would never leave that island.
Holding the prized possession, Suzy slouched in an old leather armchair. Her fingers fumbled at the sealed edges of the crisp envelope. Nearly eight years later, she was touching Pranab again.
Sujata, manorama,
I am hiding behind a siris tree and watching you skip along a narrow path in the tea field. You move so nimbly and your smile is so radiant. Is it from being near the tea bushes or are you thinking of me? You seem not to have a single care. Your beauty tempts me to cry out in ecstasy, but I won’t announce my presence until I’ve drunk in your face, body, your every movement, until I am so full that I am ready to burst.
These are the memories that make the chill of New York bearable for me. Though we have been apart for a very long time, I haven’t forgotten our times together for a single day. Still I hesitate to write to you, and may never mail this letter, but my sentiments will be there for you forever.
I think of you with all the tenderness in my being. I know your family forced you to break up with me. If only I had the courage to follow you then.
She paused for a while, peered out the window at the heart-shaped leaves of a sprawling Judas tree illuminated by the streetlight, and absorbed the meaning. Goose bumps rippled down her arms as she read the next two paragraphs—about his divorce and his plan to visit Darjeeling. She paused again, then turned to the rest:
Our Darjeeling. Nimkee, Senchal Lake, bamboo bushes, and the nightingales. As preparation, I have been practicing Bhangra dance. You remember?
The Sanskrit proverb, “Delay not that which is good,” rings in my ears constantly. I feel an urgency to be with you. Do you still love me. Sujata? Did you ever? Could you in the future? Reply only if your heart prompts you. And take as much time as you need. I’ll be waiting.
Yours always,
Pranab
Suzy refolded the letter. The bees
were buzzing again.
twenty-two
Triple taps at the door brought Suzy back to the room. Clutching Pranab’s letter in hand—how many times had she read it? five? ten?—she sprang up and opened the door. “Oh, Eva! I didn’t expect you. Come in.”
Her neighbor slipped in. Eva Pavlova, née Yee Hong, sported a bright red and gold vest that blazed and overwhelmed the muted maroon color scheme of Suzy’s living room. An excited glow made Eva’s olive face seem rounder. She took a seat in the leather recliner, while Suzy lowered herself to the futon with rosewood arms. Between them rested a black-framed glass coffee table.
Eva glanced at Suzy’s hand. “Am I interrupting anything?”
“Not at all.” Suzy tucked the letter back in its envelope and set it on the coffee table. She wouldn’t elaborate, not quite yet.
Though they’d known each other for a number of years, it still took Suzy a little time to be frank with Eva, especially when the issue was something as affecting as this letter. They’d met six years ago when Suzy had moved into this apartment complex, with its choice oceanfront location. Out of curiosity, Suzy had checked the names on the mailboxes. Reading the name “Eva Pavlova” on box 411, Suzy had conjured up a squat Russian matron in a faux fur coat, a schoolteacher, with the baggy eyes and thick speech of someone afflicted with a chronic case of the sniffles. What a surprise when Eva turned out to be this trim woman, as neat and precise as the dress patterns she worked with all day. And she wore fur only rarely. She possessed the smoothest skin this side of the Pacific. Tofu was Eva’s dietary secret, Suzy learned later.
In the years that followed, they became allies, Suzy believed, in the Asian way, close and trusting, yet maintaining a personal reserve, each safekeeping a few secrets, and neither one unduly inquisitive. (“You don’t have to talk about last night’s disastrous date with that magician guy.”) Both had been raised not to inflict their problems on others. Still, life in North America had drained their habitual reserve. They chatted more freely and openly now and occasionally offered advice on intimate personal matters that was accepted without offense. (“The alchemist who made that special perfume for you is a fraud. It doesn’t smell like you.”) Each saw that the other had her best interest at heart. (“You look awful. You need to take a couple of days off from work and just play.”) At the first hint of distress, one would show up for the other. They suffered neither jealousy nor guilt, always side by side, at ease in each other’s company and looking forward to their next rendezvous, serving as mirrors for each other’s soul. If Suzy was careless or misbehaved, Eva would be sure to point it out. (“Hey, you were pretty rough on that waiter.”) Eva wasn’t a laid-back observer. She was center stage in Suzy’s life, playing a supporting role.
Darjeeling Page 14
