The Vine of Desire: A Novel

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  Alone with silence, Anju calls up the flowers of her youth, one by one, from the depths of a lost golden world. But nothing is fully lost, is it, as long as you can name it? Joba, Surja Mukhi, Karabi. He saved Prem’s picture, all this time. How is it that you can hate and hate a person and then discover that a part of you still loves him? Shaluk. Sarba Jaya. Damp fingerprints on the photo, whorls like you might see, stargazing, through a telescope. Chandra Mallika. Champa. Nayan Tara. The names drawn out like amber taffy. Can flowers that sound so beautiful be real? Syllables of brightness flicker inside her like a tube light with a loose connection, which might turn steady, which might go out at any moment.

  It is afternoon in the glass house. The child is lying on the bed she shares with her mother, sucking her thumb. She’s supposed to be taking her nap. She considers sleepily whether it’s worthwhile to fight this rule, stupid like so many grown-up rules. In the old man’s room, she can hear her mother moving around, closing the drapes, darkening it for his rest. Her movements are elated, the child can tell this by the way her bangles clink. This is because she’s managed the morning with some success, bathing and feeding both her charges without a major accident. Today she brought the child’s high chair into the old man’s room at lunchtime, along with his tray. She was a little nervous, the child could tell from the way she kept swallowing even though she wasn’t eating anything. She spooned food alternately into their mouths as she talked to the child: Tell Da-da to drink his milk. Tell him if he eats up all his dal-and-rice, it’ll make him strong. The child thought it was funny. She babbled obediently—not that any of them were smart enough to understand what she was saying. Well, maybe the old man. He gave her a conspiratorial look when the mother wasn’t looking. They both ate a few extra spoonfuls to humor her.

  Now, lying down, the child twists the end of her blanket around her finger and blinks with sleepy surprise at the mother, who doesn’t usually come in at this time. This is because she’s trying to get the child to learn a good habit, going to bed by herself. The child is perfectly capable of this, but doesn’t always oblige—it’s better, she’s learned, to keep the adults off-balance at all times. The mother’s wearing one of her saris today, which makes her look prettier, sleeker, like a watered plant. But what is that she’s holding, that she’s putting into the music machine? The child smiles. She likes bedtime songs. She starts to clap, but a voice is calling her, a man’s voice she knows so well that it halts her limbs in midmotion. The mother has left in an agitation of fabric, shutting the door behind her. The child searches the room, her head jerking from side to side. She remembers the man, the warmth of his chest where she would lie for hours, listening to the stories he couldn’t tell anyone else, old movies that blended backward into other, older movies, or forward into his life. She wants him, suddenly, that steady, comforting breath that she’s almost made herself forget, the voice that never raised itself at her, that curve of arm, hard and soft at the same time, that held her as long as she wanted. But it’s another of those cruel adult tricks, people appearing and disappearing from her life randomly, then coming back again, this time as a disembodied voice full of sorrow, Dayita kid pumpkin I miss you so much I don’t know if I can live through this when will we see each other again. She lets the voice flow through her and out of her, carrying the pain with it. When she came to this new house, she cried for him for days, pushed away the food the mother set in front of her. Her chest hurt as if it had been caught in a slammed door. By the time she got better, it was full of silvery holes, like a sieve. She lets the voice flow through the holes upward, to where the boy waits. The dragonfly boy who darts in and out of her mind, always hungry. Here, taste, here’s what pain is like. There’s a spiderweb at the corner of the window, catching the afternoon light. A small, swaying rainbow, perfect in its symmetry. So much superior to the untidy tangles humans weave around themselves and each other. The mother has come into the room again, the mother is lying down by her, the mother has put the end of her sari over her mouth, though she makes no sound. The child lets herself wonder about this, but only for a moment. The voice on the tape calls like a thirsty bird. In the center of the web, a tiny spider, poised like a black star. She places her attention on it, lets it carry her away.

  Ten

  Sunil

  From the airplane it looked impossibly green and forested and flat all at once, such a change to the brown hills I’ve been seeing for the last ten years that I thought it couldn’t be. There were large irregularities of water, lakes or rivers, or even ocean. I’d heard that Houston was near the ocean, but in the gloom of this August evening, I couldn’t tell.

  I’m thinking of you tonight, Dayita, daughter. (Is it a presumption to call you that?) In my fancy hotel room, where the company has put me up until I find permanent accommodation, on this vast, arctic stretch of bed, speaking into a machine. I know that you might not get this tape, that I have no way of reaching you except through the goodwill of a woman who has every reason to hate me. But I must go on.

  The scene from the plane reminded me of the jungle Aguirre saw on his expedition in the Amazon, a hidden violence in the vines, possibility waiting around the bend in the river, toothed like an alligator. (I grow poetic in my loneliness. Or is it melodramatic?) I must learn not to compare my life to the movies. This is America. I’ve left my wife, misreading invitation in another woman’s eye, and ended up in a city struggling out of recession into strip malls and congested highways bordered by tenements and billboards. If you were with me, we’d laugh at them together. To get out of Jail, Dial 713-Freedom. Fortune Cabaret, Girls Exposed. Don’t Mess with Texas. Who’s the Father? 1-888-DNA-TYPE. If there are forests, they are invisible to me. The woman, a runaway, where is she now? I’m a small-time project manager beginning to lose his hair, undistinguished except by the unhappiness he has brought to everyone around him.

  Kid, do children know how to hate? Do you hate me?

  The people in the office here are surprisingly friendly. Perhaps it’s because they don’t know who I am. A bunch of young men invite me to go drinking with them on Friday nights. They surmise that I must be lonely for my wife. I have difficulty trusting friendliness, but one night I go with them anyway. My room is too sanitary, faceless in its luxury. The queen bed, the matching pastel bedspread and drapes, the empty writing desk and upright chair, gleaming from the maid’s zealous application of Endust. The shine of the faucets in the bathroom hurts my eyes. The gilt-wrapped chocolates someone leaves each evening on my pillow make me gag. Purposely, I leave my dirty clothes on the floor, let toothpaste drip onto the bathroom counter, I who used to hate it when Anju did the same thing. My futile, animal attempt to mark my territory. This is what I’ve come to, kid! In the evenings when I return, the clothes are on a hanger, the counter spotless. Two golden chocolate mints sit side by side on the turned-down bed like newlyweds. I am ungrateful to complain, no, about this affluence, when all this time I’d craved it? Still, I went to the bar.

  The night was blurry, even before I started drinking. There were dim lights in colored domes, the smell of sweat and expectation. Jukeboxes played sentimental country-western. Clink of glass and egos, girls in red heels that opened out in the back. Some of the guys in the group bought drinks for women they didn’t know. Some of them were laughing, their hands on the bare arms of women who were trying to be beautiful. They wanted to set me up with someone. She was young, with pretty, scared-looking eyes, maybe a touch of Hispanic in her. A too-wide, too dark, lipsticked smile. I excused myself and went to the men’s room. It smelled, unremarkably, of urine. A man was there, just he and I, alone. His hand was in his pocket. He pulled it out, I expected a gun. But it was pills in plastic packets. Such pretty, shiny colors. It wasn’t what I wanted. The world is full of lonely people. But sometimes it feels like I’m the only one. I bought what he promised even though I don’t believe in promises. Hadn’t she promised, too? Your mother, the way she raised her chin at me? When I went back to the
bar, everyone was laughing. No one saw me. What is worse than everyone around you laughing, and you not able to join in?

  Three days later, in the hotel room, I broke the pill like the man had instructed and put it on my tongue. I said to the darkness, Since I can’t have what I want.

  Kid, each morning I open the Houston Chronicle, delivered outside my door courtesy of the hotel. The headlines are thorned and black. The stories of the world have nothing to do with my life.

  I remember your weight on my chest. All your edges are soft and rounded, nub of elbow, tip of nose. Some nights I wake up, or maybe I have not slept at all, and bring my hand to my face. If I touch nothing, I’ll know I no longer exist. A slight, sweet smell in my palms: aloe vera from Baby Wipes. Kid, your cheek has a dimple—but is it on the left, or the right? Memory begins to betray me, tearing along its folds like old silk. Your fingers in mine, slender like the white furl of lilies. Or is it your mother I’m thinking of? In the dark, things run together. In the dark, my body cramps with doubt. She kissed me back, I’m sure she did. Under my body, her body shook with ecstasy.

  Have I made a terrible mistake? Dayita, can you hear me? Answer me, Sudha, if you’re listening, too.

  My father is dying. No one at the company knows this. They only know that I’m the first to get to the office, the last to leave. A solid worker, tenacious as a bulldog when putting deals together. They don’t know that I use work like a cough syrup, to suppress the symptoms of my disease. More work, more. It makes me loose-limbed and light-headed. But all the while, like a lump in the abdomen, the infection keeps growing.

  That’s the kind of thing Anju would have said. She liked talking in images. I’d laugh at them, call them fanciful. Now, having cut myself from her, I find myself taking on her ways.

  Last night I woke up at 2:00 A.M., couldn’t sleep again. Turned on the TV, the middle of a movie, a man and a woman walking back in the night. I knew right away they were not husband and wife. In the same way that I knew she was married to someone else. She was taking him to her house. There were chimes, silvery sounds in the black night. Then he was outside the house, she was inside. She locked the door. He picked up a porch chair, smashed the picture window with it. Oh, the shower of glass, falling in toward her like a waterfall, like it would never end! The look in her eyes, shocked, as though she hadn’t led him to this. And then pleased, because she knew she had. His face burned with wanting. I’d seen that look before, in a mirror. I turned off the movie. I knew already how it would end.

  I think of my father in images. A clenched fist. (But that’s not accurate. He never hit me. He had other methods.) A bulge-eyed cartoon character, yelling rage. His ears give off wavy lines of heat. (But he rarely yelled. He didn’t need to.) A diseased root, black and misshapen, its insides eaten away with hate. (Yes.)

  What did I do—and my mother—to arouse so much hatred?

  Maybe I should go to Calcutta before he dies, kid, just to make him tell me.

  I left the lights off in the hotel room. Still, I could see it on my palm. My pill. White like the September moon. It glowed all the way down my throat. It shone like a pearl inside my stomach. The shining took over the rest of my body. I could feel the inside of my skin, how silky it was. Pink silk, coming undone. I fell on the floor, I felt each strand of the carpet under my cheek. Tiny tentacles. Through the parted curtain I could see a star. There were rays around it, as in children’s pictures. Blue rays. The rays came all the way into the room and touched my forehead. Icy. Icy. I thought my head would burst with exquisite pain. Then I was crying. I remembered the man telling me, better not do it alone. But alone is all I have. Kid, are you ashamed of my weakness? Each hair on my arm stood up, singing an anthem. The star beam was like a lance all the way from the sky to the center of the earth. Its point pierced me, there was no pain. For a moment, for a lifetime, I was a bead on a necklace, connected to all the other beads. I stretched my hand across three states and touched you, Dayita, you shivered in your sleep. She was lying on the other side of you, in a room made of glass. Her nightdress had slipped off her shoulder. There was a red mole on her collarbone. She smiled at my touch. Write my number down, I said. Here’s my address. Here’s my e-mail. My cell phone. The words were like underwater explosions. I thought the shaking would never stop.

  Earlier today I got the letters that said he was dead. Dead. The word held a tidal wave in it. I held out my arm. In it, a million cells were dying every moment. I hated him, I did not hate him. We are all dead, only we don’t know it yet. The string broke, all the beads scattered among the ashes. Call me, Sudha, do you hear me, at least send a letter. I gave up everything for you. You can’t abandon me like this. The starlight withdrew itself. The pill was a cold sickness in my stomach. I crawled on all fours to the bed. I took off my clothes, I took off my legs, my right arm. I took off my head. It was hard to do, with only one arm. I gently loosened the eyes from their sockets. Pain is corkscrewing its way through me. Kid, I’m waiting for your letter, saying your mother was wrong, she was scared, she felt guilty for no reason, now she’s reconsidered. For the next two days, I’ll have blinding headaches. I’ll throw up in the office bathroom. My coworkers will watch me out of the corners of their eyes. The bedsheet has wrapped itself around me thread by white thread, like the dhoti they must have put on him before taking him to the crematorium. If I have no forgiveness in me, can I ask to be forgiven? Dayita, are you there, can you hear me? Dayita, I’m waiting.

  Eleven

  Sudha

  The afternoon is full of sleep and rain. Sleep like rain throughout the house, falling, and we falling into it, the old man curled on his bed like a wisp of hair, the mother and daughter lying against each other like pieces of a puzzle that don’t quite fit. The rain carries flutes, mildew, the entreaties of dreams. In the dream, a male voice elongates our names with anguish, which is sometimes called love—Dayitaaa, Sudhaaa—until they sound alike. It offers us sembak jasmines, the beach at Galveston, the NASA Space Center. It offers phone numbers and a future ready for plucking like a ripe pomegranate. The old man dreams of a place named after rain, hills colored like the backs of elephants, the Tista River bounded by the years of his childhood.

  In my dream, a woman is packing up an apartment and a life. She reaches into a closet, into the folds of suits belonging to a husband that no longer was. She takes a black-and-white photo, a child not yet born. She slips it into her bra. The husband that no longer was opens his arms to me: Come, come. I peel the pomegranate, my hands are stained with juice the color of blood. In my dream I strike out, the tape recorder falls to the ground with a sharp crack, the voice goes on calling. Sudha, Sudhaaa.

  In my dream, I’m asking the old man riddles another man told me. Why is a woman’s mind cleaner than a man’s? Why are politicians like soiled diapers? What’s the difference between a soldier and a lady? Even when I give him the answers, he doesn’t smile. Smile, damn you. He looks at me without reproach. His eyes are full of the place named after rain.

  In my dream, I tell my daughter the story of Sita’s trial by fire.

  After Ram had rescued her from the demon Ravan, he claimed he could not take her back because she may have slept with him.

  But I didn’t, Sita said.

  Where’s the proof? he asked.

  Light me a fire then, she said. I don’t want to live anymore.

  He obliged. She stepped into the flames. But she didn’t burn. The god of fire himself brought her back and vouched for her innocence. Ram and Sita were happily reunited.

  (But, having been doubted that way, can a woman be happy again?)

  In my dream, a different man this time. (This is the shape of my life, man after man, none of them right for me. Or is it I that am not right for them?) He holds out his passport to be stamped by an official in the San Francisco airport. He is taking a taxi in a country he’s never visited, to an apartment he’s never seen. He stares out of the window at the freeway dark with rain and oil
slicks.

  Sudha, Sudhaaa. In her dream, my daughter butts her head against my breasts in startled protest. When she wakes up, she will search for his voice in every room, the walker rolling over the polished wood floors like distant thunder.

  I am in a vast chamber filled with incense smoke and the faces of the dead. Is it a courtroom? Is it judgment day? Am I dead, then? I see my father, I see an unborn boy. Nicole. Mangala. Sara (is she dead, too?). Their faces are dim with sadness and smoke. Tell me, I say, what should I have done?

  The woman has finished packing and weeping. The taxi has reached the apartment where no one lives anymore. The unborn boy holds up his palms, white as paper on which nothing has been written. On the tape, the man’s voice speaks of age and cruelty, death and home. Is death our only home? The woman walks out of the apartment, the man steps out of the taxi. They meet on the threshold, which is neither inside a house nor outside of it. The old man mumbles in his sleep, Banglar mukh ami dekhiachi tai ami … I have seen the face of Bengal, so I no longer … What comes after that? I can’t remember. Once by a brown river a man spoke this same poem to a woman who was (but is no longer) me.

  Tell me, I ask the dead, what should I do?

  The dead do not give advice. They watch with sorrow as we repeat our mistakes, the same mistakes, across the world and time. I look into my father’s face to see if it is still scarred or magically healed. But words like scarred and healed belong only to the living. The man from India sits on the doorstep of the apartment, listening. The woman whose husband has left her sits next to him. She is saying things to him she hasn’t been able to tell anyone. Is this because he has appeared out of her childhood and mine, that time when she could say anything she wanted? He puts an arm around her.