The Vine of Desire: A Novel

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  There’s a train line that runs beyond the arboretum. Sunil hears a whistle, the ground beginning to rumble a bit. He did not reply to the note Sudha mailed him, although he cannot bear to throw it away. Sometimes he takes it out late at night and reads it again in the alien blue light from his computer. He feels an old pain flare in him, the way, soldiers say, they feel the ache of a cutoff limb. In his diary he has written, Old desires run deep. He has written, I am determined to overcome myself. In his last letter he asked Anju if he could see her the next time he went to San Francisco. He does not hope for anything except forgiveness. But, then, forgiveness itself is a large thing to hope for.

  A turtle swims close to the pier, beneath the surface of the water. It is larger than the others and murky brown all over. A snapper, Sunil guesses. The sun dips behind the lookout platform. He stretches and gets to his feet. It is a long way home to the one-room apartment he rents, though he could afford a bigger place, especially now that he no longer has to send money back to India. But he doesn’t see the need for such extravagance. Jasmines grow here all year, he has written to Anju. In the Hindu temple, I’ve heard, there’s a peacock sanctuary. She does not reply to his letters, but she no longer asks him not to write. On the way back to the car, he will watch for armadillos. They like to come out at this time of day. Tonight in his diary he will put, I am amazed by armadillos in all their seeming ugliness, their ability to be intimate in spite of their plated hides. Tomorrow he will write to Anju, ask if she would get him a photo of Dayita.

  Anju has turned off 280 and takes a highway that winds through a sleepy town. Scattered signal lights, a small roadside store advertising tree-ripened avocados. She looks upward. Good, the fog has cleared. Sudha is telling her about the new things Dayita can do, about the old man’s stories, the Bhutan ranges which he wants to take them to see. How Myra is threatening to visit them soon. Anju responds with tales about her professors. A movie she saw some time back about Indian women, very funny but strong also, called Bhaji on the Beach. How she’s done well enough in all her classes to make the dean’s list. She asks how Lalit is taking the news of Sudha’s departure. He, too, is threatening a visit to India, Sudha informs her with a smile she cannot quite hold back. He’s given her a calendar of Peanuts cartoons so she can mark off the days until he gets there.

  Beneath the spoken words, a whole different conversation is going on. Emotions crash against the windows of the car like birds intent on escape.

  What shall we do about the love that’s lost, the love that can never be recovered all the way?

  I’m so tired of being angry, of being lonely.

  This good-bye is so unlike the previous ones, so sadly tinged with relief.

  What shall we do with our thwarted desires, which is also our grief?

  I don’t know, I don’t know.

  On the radio, someone is singing “Achy Breaky Heart.”

  “They should ban all songs that have hearts in them,” Anju says.

  To the east, planes are taking off from San Francisco International Airport, light gleaming on their dragonfly wings. Anju has agreed to come and see Sudha and Dayita off next week. She plans to take pictures, if she can remember where she’s packed her camera.

  Sudha asks, “Did Ashok talk to you before he left?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was he really upset?”

  “What do you think?”

  Sudha bites her lip. Some actions always make us feel guilty, no matter how impossible the alternative. “I felt really bad turning him back, but I had to—”

  “He said to me, There’s no point to it anymore. We’ve become ghosts to each other. I advised him to get married—to a solid, older woman, perhaps a widow, who’d be suitably grateful.”

  Sudha bends her head, accepting the rebuke. Freedom doesn’t come cheap. She knows this. “I hope he agreed,” she says after a moment.

  But Anju has lost interest in the subject. “Close your eyes,” she orders her cousin.

  Sudha frowns. (Even this, Anju thinks, makes her look charming.) “Why?”

  “Questions, questions! Just do it.”

  Sudha shuts her eyes, but warily. “You sound like you’re up to something.”

  Anju is going very fast now, up a rattly hillside road. Sudha bites her lip and puts out a hand to brace herself against the dashboard. A line of sweat breaks out on her lip.

  “Don’t worry,” Anju says with a dry laugh. “I’m not going to kill us. Though I must confess there were days when I fantasized about it, the two of us in this car, going off the hillside together—”

  “Slow down, for heaven’s sake,” Sudha says, her face pale, her eyes squinched shut.

  Anju applies the brake. The tires skid on gravel, the car comes to a stop. “Okay,” she says, “you can look now.” They are in a makeshift parking lot on the side of a bluff. She swings open her door, and Sudha smells the brine in the air. She looks around, her brows wrinkled, trying to recall why the place looks familiar. When she looks up, the sky is full of colorful shapes wheeling about like giant kites.

  “It’s that same place!” she says, her voice slowing with remembrance. Her first outing in America, the picnic on the beach, the Pacific blue as a flame, opening out and out the way she thought her life was going to. The hang gliders swooping down to flirt with waves. The man who is not with them today.

  “How many things have changed,” she whispers.

  “They sure have,” Anju says. “That’s what I brought you up here to see.” She takes Sudha’s hand and pulls. “Come on! Hurry!” The two of them break into a run, heading for the landing area at the edge of the cliff.

  “What is it, Anju?” Sudha gasps.

  A grin breaks over Anju’s face. “You won’t believe it, Sudha,” she says. “I’ve learned to fly.”

  Epilogue

  Her first attempt is a failure, her second one also. She feels her hands shaking violently. A muscle near her mouth starts jumping. The wind is freezing cold and uncooperative. The harness cuts into her shoulders, the Velcro straps rasp her ribs. Strapped to her back, the glider is bulky, inflexible as concrete. How could she have believed it would ever hold her up against gravity? Most of all, she feels Sudha’s eyes on her. Even though she doesn’t turn to look, the apprehension in them weighs her down. Another of Anju’s harebrained schemes. Isn’t she ever going to learn! The boy is there, too, suspended somewhere above, watching just as anxiously. She is sure of this, but not in an anguished way. A haiku comes to her mind:

  Summer evening, parched insects,

  I seem to hear your voice

  In the song of the hototogisu.

  Here’s her instructor now, her red hair streaked dashingly with silver, deep laugh lines bracketing her mouth. She’s gesturing with her hands: Hold yourself like this, lightly. Walk into the wind. Angle the keel. Just like the times when we did it in tandem. The woman can’t hear the words against the roar in her ears. Trust your body. Still, their shape on the instructor’s lips urges her forward to the edge. You can do it. She’s running. This time she feels the air current catch the sail, the yanking lift of it on her backbone. Cold swirls inside her clothes, a sudden, intimate shock. Then she’s airborne.

  The woman thinks she’ll never get used to the sensation of flight, no matter how many times she does it. She pulls the control bar close to her and feels the kite gain speed. All those dreams, since childhood, of gliding and soaring. (But always, finally, her wings melting, that Icarian downward plummet, the black razor edges of rock rushing up and up until she’d startle herself awake with a cry.) This is better, infinitely. She’d never thought that real life could be an improvement on what the imagination constructed. It gives her a certain faith.

  Up, down, the wind carries her. Turn the nose to the left, move out farther over the ocean. She empties her mind of cautionary commands. Your initial flight should always be in a straight line. Flights over water are definitely unsafe. To think of them would be to doub
t, and doubt is the greatest killer. Beneath her the waves are igniting, the whole ocean is diamond fire, it makes her eyes water, she starts to wipe them and realizes she cannot because she’s wearing flight goggles. Blind now, she’s flying by feel, unafraid. It would be a fine end, to keep going like this, into the light. She remembers someone saying the words long ago. It was herself. Such a young, fledgling self. She does not want that anymore, not now. Her life is just beginning.

  Then she remembers the other thing. She takes one hand, stiff in its glove, off the bar and works in into her breast pocket. She feels around, but there’s nothing. For a moment she panics, and the glider rocks dangerously. Below, she can feel her instructor’s indrawn breath, her cousin holding her fingers crossed, pleasepleaseplease. Then it’s there, its stiff, reassuring edge nudging her forefinger. She draws it out and looks at it blurrily, the photograph taken in some doctor’s office in some other world, the ultrasound pulse a small lighted blip against the gray grainy background of her insides, and along the border, the smudged ink of her handwriting, Baby Prem, due March 16, 1993. She opens her fingers.

  The photograph is falling, turning lazily in the wind which has traveled up all the way from the Farallons. Salt and the cry of bay gulls, the ammoniac odor of developer fluid. But there are so many smells suddenly, all at once. The astringence of antiseptics in an emergency room in Redwood City, Lalit bending over a slashed arm he must repair. In a Calcutta bus, sweat and exhaust and people joking about how rib-cracking crowded it is. (“Don’t worry, Dada, you might faint but you won’t fall down—there isn’t enough space for that.”) Anju’s old apartment, where old whiffs of methi and coriander now mingle with green onion and kim chee from the family that has moved in. The glass house is filled with pollen from the ginger flowers that grow on the Assam hills, the old man in his wheezy voice singing monsoon songs for the child. Come, rain, come soon, I’ll give you a full measure of shalidhan grain. On his veranda, Ashok sets up an easel and begins to mix colors. He’s starting on a landscape today, oil and acrylic—something new for him. Maybe it will turn out to be a California scene? In his Houston office Sunil explains to a client how a configuration problem can be fixed, but underneath he’s thinking of the trip he’s planning to the Bay Area next month. What might come of it.

  The woman leans her body into the wind, into this moment that is sparking blue and silver, the same colors as Sunil’s computer screen. This moment that is dissolving. She laughs. Smell of herbal shampoo in her hair. The instructor is waving a large orange banner. YOU DID IT! The woman makes a last lazy turn, dipping a wing downward. Sudha is waving with all her might, her curls blowing every which way. In the glass house Dayita bangs a spoon in time to the beat. This is what you do with grief, you lean into it and open your fingers. You let it support you like the frail beauty of the turning, luminous earth. On Año Nuevo beach, a weaner seal turns its face toward Alaska, considering its first ocean journey. In the Sundarbans, the last of the cheetahs balance on mangrove branches. Somewhere machines are cutting down thousand-year-old trees. Somewhere a leaking pipeline spews crude oil into the sea. Somewhere juries are beginning to decide they don’t have enough evidence to declare a man guilty of murdering his wife. An old man stretches his legs to catch a buttery slab of sunlight. A surgeon cuts open an abdomen and finds it so filled with cancer cells there’s nothing he can do but stitch it up again. It is the year of stubbornness, Bosnia rejecting a call for cease-fire, India test-firing a missile powerful enough to reach China. On the radio, the announcer informs us that a sixty-two-year-old Italian woman—the oldest on record—has successfully given birth. That democracy in Haiti has been restored without firing a single shot. Which is more important? Which is less? The dead clap solemnly to the old man’s song. The hang glider bumps down on the landing strip, comes to a skittery, triumphant halt. The woman on the ground opens her arms for the woman who was in the sky. This is what we do with grief. The dead are droplets of seawater and ash, riding the air. Are they rising? Are they falling? Look, there’s no difference. The earth’s curvature is like a smile. The old man sings, O rain, come, I’ve been waiting for you so long.

  Acknowledgments

  My heartfelt thanks to:

  My agent, Sandra Dijkstra, for your ongoing championship of my work

  My editor, Deb Futter, for your careful and clear vision

  My mother, Tatini Banerjee, and my mother-in-law, Sita Divakaruni, for your blessings

  Murthy, Abhay, and Anand for making me laugh when I needed it most

  Gurumayi Chidvilasananda and Swami Chinmayananda for guiding my desires

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 2003

  Copyright © 2002 by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2002.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows: Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee, 1956–

  The vine of desire: a novel / by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. East Indian American women—Fiction. 2. Female friendship—Fiction. 3. Women immigrants—Fiction. 4. Single mothers—Fiction. 5. Married women—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.I86 V56 2002

  813′.54—dc21 2001042293

  eISBN: 978-1-4000-7581-2

  www.anchorbooks.com

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