Before We Visit the Goddess (15 page)

Years ago—Bela was still in college then—in the middle of a rainy day, there had been another letter. A young man, a stranger, had delivered it to Durga Sweets. Bipin Bihari had brought it to Sabitri at this desk, and Sabitri, recognizing Bela's handwriting, had smiled. “She probably wants some sweets,” she said. “I'm guessing it's chocolate sandesh. That's her favorite. I'm surprised she didn't call. The phone line must be down again. Tell Rekha to wait and I'll send them back with her.”

“Rekha isn't here,” Bipin Bihari said, but softly, so that no one except him heard the words. They weren't necessary, in any case. By then, Sabitri had read the letter, which was just a few lines, and pushed it toward him. The handwriting was rounded and innocent as a child's.

By the time you read this, I will be on my way to America to marry Sanjay. His life was in danger here. That is why he had to leave Kolkata. And I can't live without him. Please forgive me for not telling you earlier, but you would have stopped me.

Sabitri's face was sickly pale. She swayed when she rose to her feet. “I have to go home,” she said, her voice so unsteady that he had to lean forward to decipher her words. “I don't feel well. Will you take care of things?”

He put out his hand to support her, but she had stepped back already. “Yes,” he said. “I'll take care of everything.”

And he had. He opened the store each day at six a.m. so the cooks could light the big stoves and boil the milk that would then be curdled into the chhana from which many of their specialty sweets were made. All day he manned the phone, taking orders for engagements and baby-naming ceremonies, and even though he didn't have Sabitri's facility for polite talk, he did well enough. In the late afternoon, when the shop got really busy—commuters coming in for fresh-fried singaras and jalebis, along with a cup of sweet tea, before they headed home—he helped out at the counter. In between, he tried to get his own work done, checking accounts, calling customers whose bills were overdue, adding up expenditures, and making the required payments. If anyone asked, he said that Sabitri had come down with a bad case of the flu. By the time the store closed at nine p.m. (Sabitri liked Durga Sweets to stay open longer than the other shops, so she could catch those individuals with a late-night craving for crunchy gawja or silky-sweet yogurt), he was exhausted.

After he locked up Durga Sweets at night, Bipin Bihari caught the bus to Sabitri's flat to see how she was doing. Seeing her—it was all he thought about through the day. But he did not get to actually see her; the bedroom door would be shut tight, and she would not open it even when he knocked and called her name. He had to be satisfied with whatever specks of information he could glean from Rekha, the minute progresses they indicated.
I got Ma to drink a glass of milk today; she was crying all day in Bela Didi's room, but in the evening she took a shower and sat on the balcony; tonight she ate some rice.
Sometimes he was so tired that he would fall asleep in the middle of a sentence, sitting on the floor, leaning against Sabitri's bedroom door. Rekha would have to shake him awake regretfully, because it was not proper for a man to spend the night in a household of women.

Two weeks passed. One morning he came to the store and found the doors already unlocked. Sabitri was at her desk, looking through the calendar, making notes. She was thinner, and when she smiled she did so guardedly, as though a sudden movement might split her face open. But she was as energetic and sharp-eyed as ever, and soon everyone except Bipin Bihari forgot that she had been away at all.

Now Sabitri was folding and refolding the aerogram into a tiny rectangle. “I can't do it anymore,” she said without looking at him. “I should have listened to you years back. Do you remember—that time when you asked me to sell the place?”

He should have felt happy, or at least vindicated. She rarely admitted that she was wrong, and even more rarely that he was right. He wanted to say,
Forget that night? How can you ask? Can one forget the moment when one's life fell to pieces?
He wanted to say,
Don't leave me here
. But it was too late for words. In her mind she was gone already, billow of dust on a dry riverbed, the long wind blowing.

It was late, only Bipin Bihari and Sabitri at Durga Sweets, the last salesman having gone home a while back, pulling down the collapsible gate in the front of the store with a clang, clicking shut the lock. Bipin Bihari had finished his day's work and put away the account books. But Sabitri wasn't ready to leave, so he waited. He didn't want her to be alone in the store this late at night.

She had received, this afternoon, her largest catering order yet: she was to supply lunch for three hundred people for Mahendra Biswas's grandson's first birthday. Mahendra Babu had come to the store himself to hand her the advance—an old-time businessman, he dealt only in cash. It was a very large amount, 50 percent of the total. Most importantly, Mahendra Babu had left the menu to her:
I trust your judgment, Mrs. Dasgupta
.
And remember, no expense to be spared
. Now she sat at her desk, biting the end of her pen, creating list after list, writing down extravagant items she never got the chance to cook, and then crossing them out as too impractical, while Bipin Bihari tried to stifle his yawns.

Just as she was asking him which would be better as the main dessert, rasogollar payesh or kheer, they heard the whirr of the collapsible gate being lifted up. Before he could wonder how that was possible, three men were in the room. Their faces were covered by monkey caps made of dark brown wool. They carried pistols. Bipin Bihari had never seen a pistol. He couldn't stop staring at the black metal, gleaming like something alive. The monkey caps obscured everything except the men's glittering eyes and their mouths. Their lips were cracked and thirsty-looking. The leader, a thin fellow with bad teeth and a leaping, jittery glance, asked Sabitri to hand over the money in the safe. Sabitri pushed a fat bundle of notes at him, but the leader gestured with his pistol.
Playing games with us, lady?
Clearly they knew about Mahendra Babu's advance. Bipin Bihari tried to figure out which of their employees might have been the informant, but his brain was jammed. When Sabitri begged the leader to let her keep half the money, she would be ruined otherwise, he raised his pistol in one swift motion so it pointed at her chest. Bipin Bihari thought he heard the click of a safety catch. Terror crashed over him, an ice-wave freezing him in his corner. Then—he wasn't sure how—he was between Sabitri and the gun, hands extended in front of him, babbling. The leader made a disgusted sound and gestured to one of his men. Something came crashing down on his skull; a brief, hard light flared behind his eyes; everything disappeared.
Death
, he thought, and then,
Useless
, for he hadn't been able to protect her after all.

He awoke to a pain worse than he had imagined pain could be. It took him a moment to realize that he was lying on the floor of the back room, his head resting on a pile of towels. Sabitri knelt next to him. She had wrapped some ice chips in a straining cloth and was pressing it against his temple, which throbbed with a bottomless dullness.

“The money?” he asked. The words came out sounding wrong, but she understood.

“I should have given it to them right up front. How stupid I was to think they'd listen to anything I said.” She laughed angrily. “They took it all.” He must have winced, because she added, “Hush, don't worry about it. Thank God they didn't shoot you—just knocked you out with a pistol butt. They tore out the phone line, so I couldn't call an ambulance, and I didn't want to leave you alone while I went in search of a phone. We'll have to wait until morning. Fortunately you're not bleeding anymore, though it must hurt terribly. Shall I give you a couple of my Cozin tablets?” She held up his head so he could swallow and repositioned the towels to make him more comfortable.

Then she said, awkwardly, “What you did for me—that was very heroic.”

The sleepless night had left pouches under her eyes; the harsh overhead light tinged her skin with yellow. How beautiful she was. He put out his hand.

She pressed it against her cheek. He could feel, against his knuckles, the dried salt-tracks of tears. “And very foolish,” she added.

He said out loud the word that had been waiting in his mind for a long time. “Love.”

“Oh, Bipin,” she whispered, closing her eyes. Her lashes were newly wet, spiky against his knuckle.

“Sell the store,” he mumbled. “Let's get married. Go away. Far. Forget everything.” A poster he had seen, passing by a travel agency, came to his eyes. Hills upon shadowed hills. “Nilgiris.”

She was whispering now. He had to strain to listen. “Every day of my life, I'm thankful for you. Without you, Durga Sweets would have gone out of business a long time ago. But more than that, you're my friend, the only one to whom I can really talk.” This time he heard the sadness in her voice. “I love you, too. But not like that.”

Humiliation forced his eyes shut. How could he have been so blind, all these years? The room was quiet except for the coughing of the old refrigerator. Against his back the concrete floor was cold and sticky, melted ice or blood.

“Is this going to ruin things between us?” she asked finally. Her voice was small and gravelly with fear.

He shook his head, though it hurt like damnation to do so.
Never
, he thought, but perhaps it was a different question he was answering. He focused on the feel of her cheek against his fingers, the soft give of her aging flesh, imprinting it on his memory against the years to come.

Sabitri had become obsessed with a new idea, a signature dessert she was going to name Durga Mohan, in honor of her mother. She had been working on it for weeks in the cooking area of the store. She had taken over one of the stoves, slowing down production, disrupting schedules, terrorizing her employees. She insisted that the staff taste each version, made with different proportions of pureed mango and sugar, chhana and cardamom. When they pronounced the sweet to be delicious, she scowled at them, unsatisfied. She was a martinet, that woman. The only thing that made her zeal bearable, thought Bipin Bihari, was that she was harder on herself than on any of them. She rejected batch after delicious batch, wrinkling her nose, claiming that something was off. Twice last week Bela had phoned (she was in her final year of school, and her exams were just a month away) asking her to come home; she wanted some help with homework. Sabitri said yes both times, but within a few minutes she forgot all about it. When Bipin Bihari brought it up, suggesting that her daughter needed her more than Kolkata needed a new dessert, Sabitri requested him, in an icy voice, to kindly keep his opinions to himself.

It was late afternoon now, a slow time. The staff had gone for their lunch break. Bipin Bihari, whose habit it was to bring a tiffin carrier to work, ate by the cash register: whole-wheat rutis with potato and pumpkin curry, which he had made last night. There was more food in the carrier than he needed. Some days, Sabitri would ask what he had brought, and he would persuade her to eat with him. You're a good cook, she would say to him, always sounding surprised. But today she was in one of her moods. He could hear her banging pots and pans in the back, exclaiming in annoyance. Then the sounds died down and the smell of boiled sugar filled the air.

“Bipin,” she called in a little while. “Come quickly!” Her mood had changed, and her voice sounded joyful and wild, like that of a mynah bird that hadn't yet been snared. Even as he thought this, he knew the analogy was wrong. She had known plenty of darkness. The loss of her infant son to illness in Assam. The death of her husband in a refinery fire which, some people whispered, had been started by the union workers. Afterward she had to fight the company lawyers, a bitter, lengthy court battle, for compensation. Not that she had told him any of this. But in Kolkata it's always possible to learn someone's history if you want it badly enough.