by Sonali Dev
She could just come out and ask. But putting Ashna on the defensive right now wasn’t the smartest strategy. She wanted to talk to her girl, just for a few minutes. Maybe even try to explain how they had ended up here on two banks of this generational river.
“What are you doing up so late?” Ashna asked too awkwardly, and Shobi thought again of the ease with which she talked to Mina. “Work?”
“Honestly? I was waiting for you to come home.”
Ashna blinked. “Um. Sorry, I didn’t . . . I’m not . . .”
“Don’t apologize. It’s just that . . . Have you eaten dinner? I made some varan bhaat.”
Now she felt stupid. Boiled rice and dal was the only thing she knew how to cook. But like her, Ashna had loved the simple comfort food as a child.
Maybe it was Shobi’s imagination, but a sparkle broke through the weariness in Ashna’s eyes. “Varan bhaat?” But she got a hold of herself. “I didn’t have ghee in the house.”
Shobi went to the kitchen and Ashna followed her with her usual tentativeness.
“I made some.” Shobi popped the two bowls she had mixed into the microwave. “Ghee, now that I know how to make. I used to love the smell when our cook made it when I was little. So she showed me how to. Of course, she used to churn the butter from the cream first; I just walked down to the store and bought butter.” Shobi put the bowl of rice and lentils mixed in with ghee and fresh lemon juice in front of Ashi.
For the next few minutes—the first peaceful minutes she’d shared with her daughter since she’d arrived—the two of them ate, letting the sticky, wholesome goodness melt on their tongues and stick to their palates and fill their mouths with that internal hug of a cherished comfort food.
“This is good, Shobi, thank you— I mean, Mom. Thank you.” Ashna blushed and bent her head over the bowl to hide her embarrassment at the slip.
Shobi smiled. In that way that one smiled when one was trying to hide hurt. She knew Ashna called her by her name behind her back. She’d overheard her speaking to her cousins. It didn’t matter. Shobi liked being called Shobi. Truly, she did.
“I was wondering. Would you like me to help with the restaurant tomorrow? Mina was saying she has something to take care of.” Sure, the restaurant had made her uncomfortable. Memories of a hated ex-spouse would traumatize anyone, but she’d go back in there for Ashna.
“Oh, that’s okay, I can call Nisha. She’ll help, or she’ll find someone to help. You don’t have to worry about it.”
“I’m trying to help you, beta.” There was an edge to her voice but only because being locked out so definitively was exhausting.
Ashna flinched. She put her spoon down and stared at it, as though her anger at her mother would be more productive when directed at benign cutlery.
“Why don’t you say what you’re thinking?” Shobi said, unable to hold it in anymore.
Ashna looked at her, words dancing on her lips, in her eyes.
Just when Shobi gave up on a response, Ashna spoke. “The question is, why? Why is helping me something you’ve suddenly taken up as your latest cause?”
Her causes had always been Ashna’s nemeses; Shobi had sensed this long ago. But after her run-in with Ashna the day she’d arrived, that sense had solidified into realization.
“You’re my daughter, Ashna. You may not see it, but helping you is something that has factored into all my decisions.”
Ashna laughed, and there was almost a mean-spiritedness to it. Of all the things Ashna had said, that angry laugh hurt the most. Then Ashna turned it into a cough as though even hurting Shobi wasn’t worth the trouble. “I don’t think we define ‘help’ the same way. But thanks for ‘factoring me in’ when you could.”
This was the problem with motherhood, the part Shoban didn’t understand—why did it have to be an all-or-nothing game? Weren’t mothers human? “Okay, I deserved that. So maybe I wasn’t any help at all as a mother when you were growing up, but I’m trying to help now. Why are you so adamant about not letting me?”
Ashi went to the sink, filled two glasses with water, put one in front of Shobi, and drank hers down with such desperate gulps that Shobi feared she’d choke. “You want to sell my livelihood, but you want me to believe you’re trying to help. Tell me how this works?”
“Okay, I’ll try to explain.” She took a sip of water. “But are you sure you’re ready to hear this?”
Anger tightened Ashna’s mouth. “Go ahead. I’ll channel your strength.”
Shoban wanted more than anything else for Ashna to let that anger out, but she looked wiped. There were smudges of mascara under her eyes. Either she had cried, or she’d rubbed her eyes from sleep like she’d done as a little girl. Maybe this wasn’t the right time.
“Say it, Mom.”
“Of course I don’t want you to sell your livelihood. I want you to find a livelihood that gives you pleasure. You deserve that.”
“Not this again.”
“Do you truly have any love for cooking? Not for Curried Dreams, but for running a restaurant. Now you’re showing up in front of a camera every day and you’re this person you’ve been trying to be for twelve years in front of the whole wide world. Have you ever taken the time to ask what it takes from you? Being who you’re not takes too much energy, beta. Have you ever asked yourself why you’re doing a thing that gives you no joy? Your father is gone, there’s nothing to prove.”
Ashna picked up the glass and tapped it against the countertop, the controlled knocking of fragile glass on unbreakable stone a perfect foil to her anger. “Is there anything you don’t blame Baba for, Mom? How can you ask me to come work for your foundation while accusing him of ‘tying me up’ for doing the same thing? Aren’t you trying to tie me up in what you love too?”
And no one had stopped to consider what Ashna loved. She didn’t say it, but it was right there in her eyes.
Shobi was doing it now. She was asking Ashna what she loved and Ashna was deliberately skirting the question. “You don’t have to have anything to do with the foundation. Let’s talk about what you actually want to do with your life.”
This time Ashna’s laugh was louder, wilder. “I love this. Suddenly you have time for me. And suddenly I’m supposed to know how that works. Trust, love, being able to ask for things, having heart-to-hearts, these aren’t things you schedule into your calendar one fine day. How much time have you set aside, by the way? When does your real life need you back?” She squeezed her forehead. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter when you go back. You want to know why I don’t want your help? It’s because I don’t know how. I’ve never had it.”
“I know that. But I was put in a position where I had no choice.” The horror of leaving her little girl in the care of an alcoholic never went away, no matter how hard she tried. No matter how much she told herself that she had left Ashna in the care of Mina and Shree and not Bram. “I tried to take you with me, Ashna. I asked you to come home with me. You’re the one who refused to leave your father. How can you forget that part?”
Shobi had repeatedly asked Ashna to go with her to India. Until a time had come when putting Ashna in a position where she had to make that choice over and over again just felt cruel.
Then there was the brutal reality of her situation, the part where Shobi had to travel so much for work. Since the death of Esha’s parents and Esha and Ma-saheb’s move to California, the Sripore palace had sat mostly vacant except for servants. Ashna would have to go to boarding school if Shobi forced her to go to India with her. She’d have to leave her cousins, her friends, be uprooted again. The only other choice had been giving up everything Shobi herself wanted and letting Bram win again. In the end, she hadn’t been able to let what she wanted be the thing sacrificed. Because who was going to break that cycle if they kept capitulating?
“Wow! Are you seriously blaming me for not running back to India with you? What kind of choice was that to give a child? Baba didn’t make me choose. He never left me.”
�
�He did make you choose. You just always chose him. And how did he not leave you? By being in his drunken stupor? When did he ever ask what you wanted?”
Ashna’s grip on the glass tightened. “Fine. You’re right. You both abandoned me. Yay me. There, are you happy now? Is this the heart-to-heart you were hoping for?”
With that she left the kitchen and ran up the stairs.
Shobi watched her go, unable to follow her. She poured herself another glass of wine and raised a toast to the man who had tried his best to ruin her life.
“I thought I had beaten you, Bram,” she said to the kitchen that captured his spirit. Dark, seemingly modern yet stubbornly traditional, reeking of privilege. “But you won, didn’t you? First you put her inside me without my permission. Then you used her as a dog collar around my neck. Then you wedged a wall of lies between us that I would have to break her spirit to break down.” She took a sip of the wine. “Congratulations, you sick bastard, you won.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Had the sick bastard really won? Shoban was sure women experienced all sorts of emotions when they sat on their marital bed. She had never imagined abject hatred being one of them. Hot-burning hatred for Bram, for her father, for all the men in the world who believed deep in their souls that what they wanted took precedence over everything.
The feelings inside her made an ugly contrast with the curtain of marigolds hanging from the canopy over the bed. Rose petals covered the sheets beneath.
The maniacal laughter trapped inside her churned with the bile that pooled in her belly. Laughter was the only way she could let air in and out. If she held it in, it started to singe her lungs.
Someone had threaded together the endless flower garlands. Hours and hours spent decorating the bed on which they wanted her to die, quietly, leaving behind someone they could claim and control.
Mrs. Brahmanand Raje . . .
She ran to the bathroom and threw up.
I will not cry.
She had not cried, not since Bram decided he would have her whether or not she wanted him.
She had not cried, not since Aijaz Uncle had broken down in sobs and begged her not to ruin their lives. His, Mahira’s, Omar’s. Another man who cared nothing for her.
Shoban had fought her terror and called Omar, but she hadn’t been able to reach him. So she’d called his father. A little too late, because her father had gotten to Aijaz before her, with a warrant for Omar’s arrest. Omar had helped his father with managing their estates and Shoban’s father had been able to frame a case for embezzlement of millions. With her father’s political connections, Omar had no chance.
If Shoban breathed a word to Bram’s family, her father had threatened to have Omar thrown in jail. Shoban didn’t know how to call his bluff.
“I will have no choice but to kill myself if you shame our families this way.” Aijaz Uncle was not a man given to drama, so his words had been a nail in her coffin.
Shobi had imagined it with relish. All these fathers hanging by nooses. Dead. She could build a life on that. She wasn’t so sure about Omar.
Oh, Omar. She missed him so much she could barely breathe around it. Her absolute belief that she would see him again had kept her standing through that sham of a wedding ceremony. This wasn’t a marriage. Who cared how many rituals they put her through, how many pieces of paper they made her sign. Once she figured out how to keep Omar safe, she was going to burn those pieces of paper.
She gripped the mangalsutra around her neck, a gold chain threaded with black beads, a pendant of diamonds hanging from it. In the part in her hair was red powder. On the finger they used to tether women to the men who owned them was a band of gold studded with diamonds so brilliant she blinked when she looked at it. On her toes were toe rings. Four symbols marking her body to make sure no one ever mistook her for not being taken, owned. Four signs. And Bram wore none. Not one.
Omar and she had talked about their wedding as something they would celebrate by themselves, just the two of them. They had always known they’d elope. They were going to sign a piece of paper for the law, he would write her the most beautiful vows (she’d made him promise this), and then they’d take a boat to Sindhudurg and he’d recite them to her as they sat on the historic fort wall in the middle of the ocean.
She came back into the flower-infested room. A shield crossed with swords from some war the Raje ancestors had fought hung on the wall in front of her. There was an entire armory in the north tower, but it was all useless. Most of the guns and weapons were behind glass cases and as antique as the patriarchy that was holding her inside these walls.
She could find one of those guns, or throw herself off the balcony. There were a million ways to humiliate them by presenting them with her corpse on her wedding day. What would that get her? It would be the same as accepting Bram, accepting this new life. It would be accepting defeat.
Her father had done this so he could forge a relationship with the Rajes, to attach himself to the place in society they afforded. Bram had done this to prove that he could. The reason why Bram did everything. How had she thought him harmless? Men like him were never harmless. Men like him, those gods of apathy, were worse in some ways than men like her father, the keepers of control, the true believers, who knew their way of life would be lost if their daughters rose to stand beside their sons.
No.
Shoban was going to stay Shoban.
One by one she started to remove the metal chains, the gemstone balls. She unhooked the nose ring, a cluster of pearls formed into a paisley around a ruby that her mother had worn at her wedding. Uncut diamonds formed into layered jhumkas hung from her ears all the way to her shoulders—earrings Bram’s mother had worn to her wedding. More chains wound around her ears and hooked into her hair to hold it all in place. Everything tied up and tangled and secured.
Bangles from her wrists halfway up to her elbow, cuffs of gold interspersed with green and red glass. The breakable and the unbreakable clinking against one another. Amulets and anklets that had rubbed her skin raw. She cast it all off. One heavy weight after another.
An ungodly calm settled into her bones.
Next came the flowers in her hair. Enough of them that an entire garden had to have been massacred. Tuberoses and roses and five varieties of jasmine. The only other time she would be this covered in flowers would be when she lay on her pyre.
The two times they covered women in flowers—their wedding day and the day they died. Who could have imagined those two would feel so remarkably alike?
Omar’s favorite song had been filmed on the wedding bed. One much like this with curtains of flowers turning it into a cage . . .
Kabhie Kabhie mere dil mein khayal aata hai
ke jaise tujhko banaaya gaya hai mere liye.
Sometimes a thought whispers in my heart
that your very existence was formed for me and me alone.
During the scene, the groom—also undesired—undresses his bride as she sings the poetry composed by the lover she had hoped would be her husband.
When Shoban had watched the song on the screen, her skin had crawled at the groom touching the bride. He has no right to her body, something inside her had always screamed.
That voice inside her was screaming now. The idea of anyone but Omar touching her made her sick.
“Give this a chance,” her father had said after the wedding ceremony was over. “It’s for your own good.”
“No, it’s for your good, actually,” she had said to him with the same self-congratulatory smirk he and Bram had pasted on their faces through the ceremony. “You are not welcome in this house anymore.”
Like the rest of the guests—not too many, because the wedding had taken place fast once Bram and her father had realized that giving her time might help her escape—her father had rushed to congratulate her. But she had stepped away. “You made sure this was my home, and I am asking you to leave it. Get out.”
He had leaned in to he
r. “Don’t do all this tamasha right now and humiliate your family.”
“You are no longer my family. I asked you to get out of my house, and if you don’t, there will be a tamasha like you’ve never seen. You will drop the charges against Omar and send me proof that he is safe. If I find out that you harmed Omar or his family in any way, I will make sure I use all the power the Rajes wield to do to you what you threatened to do to Omar.”
She had made sure Flora had her father’s bags packed and in his car. That man would never set foot in Sagar Mahal again.
Shoban locked the door. She had no idea where Bram was. Probably being lectured by his brother, who had hurriedly flown out for the wedding from California, or saying goodbye to the guests, or handing celebratory mithai to the loyal subjects of Sripore. She didn’t care. She undid the safety pins and removed her sari. Blood-red hand-woven Paithani silk embellished with twenty-four-carat gold thread. Bram’s mother had asked if she needed one of the maids to help her undress. She didn’t. Not that it had been an unkind offer.
Maya Devi had tried to talk to her before the wedding, but Shoban’s father hadn’t left them alone and after her experience with Bram, she wasn’t sure if she could trust anyone. The bruises he’d left on her arms still stung.
She rummaged through the trousseau her father had probably paid someone an obscene amount of money to put together at such short notice. All these bright colors and silks. Clothes chosen for her by someone who had no idea who she was.
She looked through the duffel bag she had brought with her when she’d thought she was coming for a visit. She picked out a white cotton kurta appliquéd with white thread.
Widow’s white. It calmed some of her rage, focused it. Until she was in Omar’s arms again, she would only wear white.
When she stepped out of the room, Flora jumped off her stool. “Tai-saheb, you need something?” She looked confused by Shoban’s suddenly and starkly unbridal clothes.
Shoban shook her head. “Just need to get some air.”
Flora started to follow her, but Shoban raised her hand. The action much more imperious than she was feeling. “I’ll be back in a bit. I just need to be alone.”
