English Lessons and Other Stories (20 page)

Asha liked different clothes, too. Last week, Devika showed
him slick American magazines full of disdainful sullen-faced white women and pointed out the cowboy jean jackets and high-heeled boots that Asha liked. At last she was interested in something Canadian, so Ratan took her to Fairview Mall to buy them, and she tried them on for Asha — “Asha and I are the same size.” But when they returned home, she locked them away in Asha's closet in the little bedroom. That, at any rate, was proper. He approved; he wouldn't want strange men to see her dressed in those clothes. But she'd locked away the high-heeled black patent leather shoes and the lingerie, as well. She was wasting his money.

One evening, there was the unmistakable smell of cigarette smoke and all the windows were open.

“Were you smoking?” he asked.

“Oh, no,” Devika replied. “Asha likes a cigarette sometimes, it must have been her.”

Asha, it turned out, didn't like the cheaper Canadian cigarettes — she liked Benson and Hedges. Asha was not neat and careful, like Devika. Devika threaded her rings on her watch strap and clasped the watch to her bedside lamp at night as though she were in a hotel, while Asha left little stubs in ashtrays in the spare bedroom, where the twin-size bed was always immaculate as a convent girl's, a long-haired doll on the white counterpane. (Ooff! He too was beginning to think of Asha as though she were real.) If Devika wanted to smoke and blame an imaginary woman, he wasn't going to let her think it bothered him. Besides, he was doing well. Even Peter Kendall had been impressed when he'd brought in three new clients this month. Ratan hadn't mentioned the last one was a Jew.

Asha's tastes were getting more expensive. Cocoa and bokchoy and marmite and marinated artichoke hearts. And now, “Asha wants a camera,” Devika had informed him last night.

Maybe the camera was the answer. A new toy. It would distract Devika from this Asha nonsense, and she could take pictures from
the balcony and send them to her parents. She was always complaining how homesick she felt. Then, when Devika was normal again, he could ask Peter Kendall and his wife to dinner.

He turned to his brothers-in-law. They were older, they must be consulted about expensive things like cameras. “I plan to buy a camera,” he said. “What would you suggest?”

His brothers-in-law drew round in solemn solidarity. They considered, eyes raised to the ceiling, hands deep in their pockets or twirling mustaches. Judgements were pronounced with finality.

“Nikon, bhai. Best. Top of the line.”

“Ricoh, bhai. Can't miss.

“Get a Canon, Baba. You can always sell it in India.”

He wouldn't take any of their advice, of course. If he took one brother- in-law's advice, the other two would be insulted. But if he hadn't asked for advice they would all have been mortally wounded for a month.

Yes. A camera would be just the right thing.

Vandana Di came out of the kitchen bringing the smell of rice and warm lemons. Ratan felt himself tense in case Devika had been talking about Asha. But naturally Vandana had been talking to Devika about her brother, not about Devika.

“So, Baba, when are you going to be promoted?”

Ratan bought Devika an Olympus camera and a twenty-four-exposure Kodak film, because they were on sale. When he brought it home, he was careful to say, “This is for Asha. I'll show you how to use it, and you can show her.”

There wasn't much to explain about the camera, but he spent an hour advising her on composition, and ASA numbers, and light and the importance of keeping the camera safe. It was the most he had ever spoken to her, and he could feel her listening with appropriate respect, so he was eloquent. He needed her
admiration that day. An old client of the firm had called Peter Kendall and accused Ratan of bad judgement in managing his portfolio. Peter Kendall had called him into his office and said, “Mr. Berton doesn't like a Paki managing his money. He has nothing against you personally, you know. He would just prefer to be with someone else.”

“I understand,” said Ratan, making his voice cheerful, willing, professional.

He'd told himself it didn't matter, and after work he'd stopped at the Hong Kong Camera discount store on Spadina to buy the camera, but then suddenly he'd given in to the anger. Pure anger, making him fight the rush-hour traffic as though he were driving in Delhi again, looping in and out and honking all the way to Little India on Gerrard Street. There he'd eaten chaat with his fingers, like a desi-dihaat from a village, and drunk a brown bottle of warm Rosy Pelican beer, as though daring Peter Kendall to drive by and see him.

Devika hadn't said anything about his being late. Hadn't asked him any questions about his day. Hadn't even met him at the door. She was in Asha's room with the door closed, talking. Taking both sides of the conversation, her high-pitched Lata Mangeshkar voice alternating with a lower, sexier, huskier tone. And an occasional laugh (he had never heard Devika laugh), a knowing, Asha laugh.

“What were you laughing at?” “Asha was saying how white-skinned people think they look clean all the time so they don't bathe.
Chi
, dirty people.”

She was, however, enchanted by the camera. She took his picture immediately. Then another and another. He was flattered, posing for her on the new couch, at the smoked-glass dining table, on the balcony, with the CN Tower behind. She stopped only when he told her not to finish the roll because, after all, film is expensive.

But when they sat down at the table, there were three place
settings again. Devika's plate had the camera beside it, lens pointed straight at Ratan. And as he, with mystified conscientiousness, watched the Maple Leafs play ice hockey on his new TV in the living room, Devika brought halwa in three dessert plates. And later he dreamed he was late for a meeting with Mr. Kendall and woke, sweating and in need of a woman, and he reached for her… but she was gone.

Ratan swore under his breath and found himself in Asha's room, and there was Devika, curled up on the white counterpane, asleep under a shawl. He scooped her up at the waist as though gathering a wayward kitten, and she fought his strength, his embrace, his very touch until he had her on the king-size bed and showed her struggle is futile.

He left early the next morning without breakfast, so she would feel appropriately guilty, and he went to bed without sitting down to dinner. He heard her with Asha at the dining table, talking like a crazy person to the air.

Devika rose at five in the morning. Ratan liked her to make alloo parathas for breakfast and a sandwich for his lunch and it took time. But last night, Asha and she had stayed up late, talking as they had in school, and now Devika was sleepy.

Asha was again the girl she used to be in college, before she was transformed by marriage. She was
there
, sitting cross-legged on the twin bed, angered as she used to be by things Devika never questioned, and they'd spent most of the night arguing, discussing. Asha wanted things Devika had never wanted. Asha wanted to take driving lessons. Asha wanted to visit Niagara Falls. Asha wanted to take flying lessons at Brampton Airport, instead of going and visiting Vandana Di every Sunday. Asha wanted to climb the CN Tower and go to Canada's Wonderland
all alone
. Asha wanted to know how it felt to ride a horse bareback. Asha
thought love should make a woman feel like a banana split with all three scoops melting inside. Asha wanted to ride a fork-lift truck and wear a hard hat and overalls. Asha wanted to drive all the way to Vancouver with a CB radio and a trucker who could sing woeful country ballads. Asha wanted to talk and have someone listen, someone besides Devika. That strong will, that unfettered enthusiasm for every experience, that appetite. That unadulterated, unmasked,
selfishness
. Haw, ji, haw… Shame! Devika had tried to reason with her all night.

“Asha,” she'd said. “You should be grateful. You have a loving family. You have parents who trusted you enough to send you abroad
alone
to visit me. You have good looks. You have a wealthy husband to take care of you. You even have a son. What more can a woman ask for?”

“Love,” said Asha.

“You have love,” said Devika wretchedly. “You have family who take care of you.”

“Taking care of me is not Love,” said Asha, deep-voiced as the low string on a sitar. “I have people who love me because I am there. Not people who love me because they know me.”

“But Asha, you are so difficult to love. I'm sure everyone would love you if you would only be nice. Is that so difficult? To just be nice?”

And Asha had responded as though they had still been melodramatic little children in pigtails wearing candy-striped frocks to school. She had risen from the little bed and thrown the trusting, wondering, innocent, long-haired doll out of the window. Twenty-one stories.

Devika had recoiled in fright.

She decided Asha needed to worship more. Worship keeps you from thinking about why things are the way they are and even about why things are not the way they could be. She stood on a stepladder in the kitchen and lifted the black metal statue of dancing
Lord Shiva out of obscurity in the cabinet over the refrigerator where Ratan had banished him. Contemplation of the Nataraj with his powerful foot on the neck of ignorance would bring Asha a better sense of her own insignificance. Devika carried the idol to Asha's room, set it on the bed where the long-haired doll had lain and closed the door behind her.

Because surely that was the real problem. Asha had become a woman who had made the mistake of believing she was somehow…
significant
.

All the pictures on the first roll of film were of Ratan, and his sisters approved. Devika gave them the ones they wanted and set about hunting Ratan again, so she could take his picture unawares. He began to feel as though she were stalking him as a panther stalks a kakar in the terrai. He took two rolls in for developing and found not a single picture of the apartment, not one picture taken from the balcony. Not one picture of maple leaves turning red and gold in the Don Valley, or the CN Tower against a sunset. All pictures of Ratan, as though she wanted to have him, a piece of him, all the time. And they weren't even nice pictures; his hair was thinning.

In fact, his hair was falling out in patches. There were small bald spots on the back of his head, and he took himself to the emergency room at North York Hospital.

“Stress-related,” said the doctor from Poland. But for Ratan, there was a jeer in his voice, the older immigrant's snigger.
Sissy, it was ten times more difficult when I came here. You just can't take it. What will you do if you don't have what it takes, can't make it
? “But,” continued the doctor, “nothing to worry about.”

He thought of telling the doctor his stress was all Devika's fault. Devika and her Asha friend
… imaginary
friend. No, he couldn't tell the doctor that, couldn't bother the doctor with women's
problems. And Canada was causing his stress, and so was Peter Kendall, with his return-on-investment figures and his graphs and his market statistics. The rules are simple enough: low risk, low reward; high risk, high reward. The immigrant mantra. Still, Peter Kendall pored over his LOTUS 1-2-3 spreadsheets with their what-if analyses that couldn't beat a Turk reading tea leaves.

And so were his family causing this stress. Letters from his parents telling him to find a Canadian company interested in a joint venture and come home with dollars in his pockets. Vandana Di's remarks about loving sisters and their husbands who helped their only brother come to Canada so the whole family could do well. And Devika was not helping at all. Ratan was beginning to feel she was daring him every day. Daring him to prove he could make her happy, to prove that giving up her family and coming to Canada was worth it. Daring him to take Asha and make her disappear.

He had to drive her to Loblaws, write the cheque, manage everything. She couldn't even remember his PIN number for the cash machine. She was helpless before the simple task of cleaning the bathtub. How had she ever graduated from college? Maybe her parents had lied to his about that.

She couldn't even remember to press B for Basement, so they always had to stop in the lobby and look foolish as people tried to join them on the elevator. “Going down. Going down,” he would tell them, letting the closing door obliterate the mocking vanilla faces.

He tried to teach Devika to drive, but either she was too nervous or he was too impatient. She would not remember to fasten her lap-belt even though he'd told her the police could charge him a fifty-dollar fine for her stupidity. And the simple sequence “mirror — signal — shoulder check” was enough to reduce her to tears. Vandana Di said he should get her a few driving lessons, but why should he pay for some strange man to teach her what
he knew already? Besides, there was a certain power in telling her what to do and having her fail; it made him feel, well… larger.

“Asha says her ears hurt when you shout,” said Devika, letting Her Invisible Highness out of the back seat after one such lesson.

“Tell Asha her ears are really going to hurt when I catch them and twist them off her nasty little head,” said Ratan. The threat felt good. In fact, it needed embellishing. “Tell Asha she can go back to India because I'm ready to wring her ugly little neck.”

And Devika stood there with that look of fragile innocence betrayed till he relented and said, “All right. Tell Asha she can stay.” Then, with a flash of inspiration, he added, “For another week.”

But at the end of the week, Asha was “very sick with a backache” and could not be moved.

“I'll go in and talk with her, I'll find out how she is,” said Ratan.

He knocked with an elaborate flourish at the door to the spare room. The Nataraj Shiva lay like a black spider on the counterpane and the room was still. Devika watched him from the living room.