by Rani Manicka
That night I loved him so much it hurt.
“Let’s go back to the hotel,” I whispered. I couldn’t wait any longer to lie beside him. To be his.
Inside the hotel room I felt shy once more. I thought for a moment about changing into that silk wisp that I had in my suitcase, but the mere thought of it made my entire body flush. I decided that there was always tomorrow. On a glass table was a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket and a large bowl of bright red strawberries. I leaned against a pillar and watched Luke pick up the bottle. He raised his eyebrow.
I nodded. I had lost the merry feeling during our walk along the Embankment and could have done with that daring devil-may-care surge of courage that bubbled out of that first bottle of champagne at the restaurant. There was a soft pop and a friendly hiss, and then Luke held out a glass of bubbles in front of me.
I remember I accepted the glass, laughing, giggling, happy. My eyes met his, and the laughter died in my throat. The stranger was standing there looking at me out of Luke’s face.
“To us,” the stranger said softly, and then he was gone in a flash, and Luke and I drank two glasses and fell on the bed in a tangle of arms, legs, and faces. For one horrid moment I thought of Mother standing over the bed with her hands on her hips. She would certainly disapprove of such behavior.
“Switch off the lights,” I said quickly.
The room, bathed in the Christmas lights from the trees outside, spun when I closed my eyes. I remember lips, and eyes, and skin like raw silk, and sometimes a voice thick with emotion called my name. There was a moment of pain followed by gentle hands and then rhythm. When it was over, I closed my eyes and slept inside a pair of warm, strong arms. Outside, the cold English wind rustled in the trees, but I was safe.
Sometime in the night I awakened, my mouth dry and my head throbbing. I stumbled out of bed and got myself a drink. Ooh, my head. How it hurt! There was aspirin in the bathroom. I took two, and in the mirror was Luke. He looked at me, and I looked back boldly, unembarrassed by my nakedness.
“My Dimple,” he said, so possessively that I felt a quiver run down my back. Finally I belonged to him. We made love again. This time I remembered everything. Every kiss, every thrust, every sigh, every moan, and that incredible moment when my body became liquid, when my closed eyelids turned red as if a million strawberries had been squashed so close together that they made a wall across my eyes.
Two weeks later we flew back, our bags full of Gucci belts, French perfume, Italian leather, beautifully packaged presents from England, and a mountain of duty-free chocolates. I walked into the vast interior of my new home and felt rather intimidated. It didn’t feel like mine. Too grand. Instead of a small white house, I now had highly polished black marble floors, a richly painted ceiling, and expensive furniture that I feared to ruin. Walking around the house the next morning, I had the idea of asking Amu to move in with me. She could be my companion, and we could do the housework together. So Amu came to live with us.
“This is not a house. It’s a palace,” she gasped. She had never seen anything like it in all her life. Poor Amu had had a very poor life. I showed her the washing machine, and she giggled like a little girl.
“This white box is going to wash the clothes?” she asked doubtfully.
“Yes,” I said. “It can even dry them.”
She looked at the buttons and dials on it carefully before declaring it of no use to her. “Just get me a length of hose and some pails, and I’ll show you how clothes should be washed,” she said.
I showed her all the bedrooms and asked her to choose one, but she only wanted the small room by the kitchen. She said that was the place where she would feel most comfortable. From her window she could see my summer house, and she was pleased with that.
I sat on the bed and watched her as she built her prayer altar and lovingly filled it with old framed photographs of Muruga, Ganesha, and Lakshmi. She had found a new prophet, Sai Baba. Wearing an orange robe and a kind smile, he turns sand into sweets and brings his devotees back from the dead. Amu lit a small oil lamp in front of his picture. From a torn plastic bag she unpacked her five faded saris and some white sari blouses and put them into her cupboard.
Afterward we had tea in the shade of the large mango tree. I sat there listening to her familiar voice recount stories about her spiteful second and third cousins, and by and by I felt comforted once more. I was back where I belonged, beside the woman that I had loved for so many years like an aunt. No, like a mother.
One day Luke came home early from work and found Amu and me chatting amicably as we polished the curving banisters. He literally stopped dead in his tracks.
“What are you doing?” he asked very softly. There was a note of disbelief in his voice. Both Amu and I stopped working and stared at him. It was obvious straightaway that he was very angry, but I couldn’t understand why.
“We are polishing the banisters,” I explained, wondering if they needed special polish or something. God, how was I to know?
He walked up to me. He took my hands in his and looked at them. “I don’t want you to do the work that servants do,” he explained very softly.
I could feel Amu standing frozen by me. He ignored her completely. I felt embarrassed and hurt. Hurt for Amu, and embarrassed that he had seen fit to chastise me in this way in front of her. My skin was growing hot under his cold stare. I nodded slowly, and he turned away and walked into his office without another word. I was so shocked that I simply stared at the closed door until I felt Amu’s thin rough palm on my hand.
“It is the way of men,” she said, looking deep into my miserable eyes. “He is right. Look at the state of my hands. I can do the banisters myself. Why, I have done far more than this house in my lifetime. You go. Wash yourself and go to him.”
I went upstairs, washed my hands, and in the mirror saw my surprised, confused face. Then I went downstairs and knocked on his study door.
He was sitting in his swivel chair. “Come here,” he said.
I walked up to him and sat on his lap. He took my fingers and kissed them one by one. “I know you want to help Amu, but I don’t want you to do the housework. It will spoil your pretty hands. If you want to help Amu, get another servant to come in three times a week to do the heavy jobs.”
I nodded. “Okay,” I said, eager for his anger to pass. Eager for that soft menace in his voice to go back where it came from. Eager that he should smile and ask, “What’s for dinner?” in his usual voice.
Sometimes Mother came to see me in my big house. Usually we sat for a while, then I gave her money and she left, but one day she came troubled and frustrated. Nash was in yet another spot of bother. As we spoke, I don’t remember the reason, but I must have displeased her, for she raised her hand to strike me. But the blow never came to pass, because suddenly there was Luke with his hand in an iron grip around her wrist.
“She is my wife now. If you lay another hand on her, you will never see her again or be a grandparent to any of her children,” he said in a pleasant voice.
I looked at him and saw the stranger. His eyes were cold and hard, and in his cheek a small muscle jumped angrily. And I fell in love with the stranger all over again. No one but Grandma Lakshmi and sometimes Papa had ever stood up for me.
I felt like the goddess that lay peacefully asleep under the huge hood of a many-headed serpent. He was my scalloped canopy. My eyes moved to Mother. Her face was harsh with the thwarted rage of a bully. I could hear her thinking, She was my daughter first. She could have just given in gracefully, made it all right, but Mother is so proud that her mouth twisted into a sneer, and when she turned and met the shining love in my face, her scorn changed to disgust. She wrenched her hand out of Luke’s grip, spat at my feet, and stalked out.
Luke took a step toward me and pulled me to him. I wanted afresh to enter him through his breastbone, hear his thoughts, see what he saw, and be part of him. I imagined him taking his arms away from around my body and see
ing my limp body fall to the floor. Would he know that I was already inside him? A part of him. The words of a Sufi song that I had once laughed at as ridiculous and dramatic appeared in my head.
Can’t you see my blood turning into henna?
Just to decorate the soles of your feet?
The mango tree in the garden blossomed. It was magnificent. Amu built a hammock under it and napped there every afternoon. I watched her from my summer house, and she looked enviably peaceful.
I went to see Uncle Sevenese at his studio apartment. It was a terrible place, four flights up a dirty iron staircase, at the end of a smelly corridor black with dirt, behind a faded blue door. While I was climbing the stairs, careful not to touch the greasy banisters, I saw a woman step out of his blue door. She was attractive in a hard sort of way, with her hair in a smart bob. She wore white hot pants and white stiletto heels. Her heels were loud on the metal stairs.
Suddenly I didn’t want to come face to face with her. I didn’t know what I would see in her face. Quickly I turned around and went back downstairs. I hid in an old-fashioned Chinese coffee shop, where a tired fan whirled quite high on the ceiling and old Chinese men half sat and half squatted on three-legged wooden stools as they sipped their coffees and ate toasted white bread spread with kaya. I ordered a cup of coffee and felt inexplicably sad, remembering Uncle Sevenese telling me how he used to wait outside the baker’s to steal little tubs of kaya. In those days it was not green but orangeybrown. He used to open the tub, stick his tongue in it, and lick the sweet mixture of coconut milk cooked with egg yolks.
When I was younger, he was my hero on a white elephant who could do no wrong, but now he lived all alone in a tiny apartment with hard-faced prostitutes in unsuitable shorts leaving his room at eleven in the morning.
When enough time had elapsed, I tried the stairs again. He opened the door, bleary-eyed, and grunted when he saw me. He walked away, leaving the door open. I let myself in.
“Good morning,” I said cheerfully, avoiding the sight of the unmade bed. He looked as if he was nursing a really bad hangover. I took the packets of cigarettes I had bought at the coffee shop downstairs out of the brown paper bag and put them on the table beside the bed. He plugged in a kettle.
“How’s it going?” he croaked, unshaven, his eyes smudged with ghastly dark rings.
“Not too bad,” I said.
“Great. How’s your dad?”
“Oh, he’s fine. He’s just got nothing more to say to me.”
He turned around from making his coffee. “Do you want one?”
“No, I had one in the coffee shop,” I said automatically and then, remembering, blushed. My uncle watched me with a sly smile. He knew I had seen the prostitute. He was still a child who enjoyed shocking people. He lit a cigarette.
“And how’s your husband?” There was a new note in his voice. I didn’t like it.
“Fine,” I said brightly.
“You still haven’t given me his birth date and time so I can work out his chart,” he accused, looking at the kettle through a haze of smoke.
“Yes, I keep forgetting,” I lied, knowing full well that I didn’t want to give him the astrological details. I suppose I feared what he would find. “I’ve brought you some cigarettes,” I said quickly to change the subject.
“Thank you.” He looked at me speculatively. “Why don’t you want me to do his charts?” he asked.
“It’s not that I don’t want you to do Luke’s charts. It’s just that—”
“I had a dream about you. . . .”
“Oh, what about?”
“You were walking in a field, and I realized that you had no shadow. And then I saw your shadow running away from you.”
“Ugh. Why do you have such dreams? They make my hair stand on end. What does this dream mean?” I asked, full of dread when I wished to be scornful of superstitious nonsense in my new happy life. In my large house with its crystal chandeliers, frolicking Renaissance figures, and perfume compartments in the ceilings, Uncle Sevenese and his dreams had no place. I began to regret coming to see him. As soon as I saw that prostitute, I should have simply left. Then I felt mean, entertaining such beastly thoughts. I looked around at the shabby room. I used to love him with all my heart.
“Why won’t you let me help you?” I asked.
“Because you can only give me material things that I don’t need and won’t do my soul any good. Do you think I would be happier in a big house with a black marble floor?”
“So, what is this dream of yours supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. I never know until it’s too late, but all my dreams are warnings of ill fortune.”
I sighed. “I have to go, but I’m leaving some money for you on the table, okay?”
“Thanks, but don’t forget to bring the details of your beloved next time around.”
“All right,” I agreed wearily, my good mood entirely ruined.
What had happened to the times we spent talking for hours late into the night after everyone else had gone to sleep? There was nothing left to talk about. I knew it was me. I was frightened of letting him near enough to destroy the fragile wings of my happiness. I had never been so happy in all my life, and I knew that he had the power to destroy it. In fact, I was sure he could.
I knew things were too good to be true, but the illusion of happiness had to be protected at all cost. I made a decision to stop seeing Uncle Sevenese for a while.
Three months later Luke was ecstatic when I told him I was pregnant. I wanted to call the baby Nisha if it was a girl. A long time ago Grandma Lakshmi had wanted that name for me, and I thought to please her by naming her great-granddaughter Nisha instead. Beautiful like the full moon. I hung pictures of Elizabeth Taylor all over our bedroom so that the first thing I laid my eyes on in the morning and the last thing I saw before I retired was beauty.
I began to feel sick all day. Grandma Lakshmi advised ginger juice. Luke brought me flowers wrapped in silver paper and ordered me to do no work at all.
It was while I was lying quietly in bed one night that Luke sat down beside me and started telling me about his past. He was orphaned when he was three years old. His mother, a young Chinese girl, was raped by Japanese soldiers and left for dead. She somehow survived and gave birth to him, but eventually died of malnutrition on the steps of a Catholic orphanage. The nuns opened the door one morning to a child crying by her cooling body. His poor little body was covered in sores and his belly distended with worms.
They gave him the last name of the nun who found him, Sister Steadman. Although they brought him up as a Christian, he remained steadfastly Buddhist, and strangely attached to all things Japanese. It was the strength of his will that kept him so. I cried when he told me how little Luke would wake up in the middle of the night and leave the softness of his bed to wedge his small body between the two bottom shelves of a cupboard. The nuns found him each morning for almost a year curled up between the familiarity of two hard surfaces. I thought of the child Luke with a distended belly and emaciated limbs, and I wondered if his eyes had been opaque then.
The months passed very slowly. Every day my body changed. I moved out of our shared bedroom. Luke needs the temperature very cold to sleep, but a wheezing had begun in my chest. The pregnancy had made me delicate. I would return to my husband’s bed when the baby was born. I lay on the cool floor of the living room and stared at the paintings on the ceiling. The truth was, I wasn’t sure I liked them all up there watching me. The artist had made all those people seem not just alive but present, as if they were a stern race that existed on another level inside the varnish on my ceiling. When I switched off all the lights and went upstairs, they came down and helped themselves to the food in the fridge. In fact, if I stared at them for too long, I began to feel they changed their expressions. For the most part they seemed indifferent, but sometimes, just sometimes, it seemed as if they were quietly amused by our goings-on. The more I looked at their foreign fac
es with their proud Roman noses, their vaguely smug expressions, and their curved, spoiled mouths, the more sure I became that I wanted to take a brush and paint the whole damn thing white. But Luke likes them up there. He is proud of his ceiling. He says it is a work of art.
I suppose it is just that I was bored. I had nothing to do all day but wait for Luke to return. I missed the friends that I never saw anymore. I had shopped enough to last a lifetime, and I was, of course, not allowed to take walks in the evening on my own for fear of kidnap, rape, and murder. Forbidden to soil my pretty hands with ordinary housework, or for that matter gardening, I was quite the useless wife. When would the baby arrive?
I went into Luke’s study, and he had his back to me, looking out of the window. Ramrod straight. Lost to me. Music swirled around him. A jilted Japanese lover’s song.
Mix me the poison
For I wish to join the souls of the dead
Unwanted as I am
It is very pleasant the path to paradise
It was the woman’s haunting voice mingled with the lilting flutes that carved him so still. Watching him standing there, I knew he was sad inside. Some deep part of him that I cannot touch. I felt it reach out like a thin wayward tentacle that refused his master’s iron will. Gently, gently, I had begun to understand Uncle Sevenese’s desire for a cold lip, for I too had begun to long for the coldly distant lips of my husband.
“Luke,” I called softly. And I saw the poor little boy with the distended belly rise off the floor, shake off the tattered clothes of his orphanage, and step into the smart navy blue bush jacket and trousers that Amu had ironed yesterday. And so attired, Luke turned away from the window to face me.
“You’re back,” he noted with a smile.
“Yes,” I said, walking into his outstretched arms. The baby lay between us. I loved him dearly.
