In the Convent of Little Flowers (16 page)

“And so do you.”

Yes, he thinks. “Who will you …” He stops, unable to ask anything further, and sees a little smile lift the edges of her mouth. It is that smile, that non-smile, that knowing light in her eyes when she does this that made Sat want to form the club.

A couple of years ago, the eight of them had gone out for dinner at a gentlemen’s lounge. They had watched as the
slender, black-clad waitresses had leaned over their shoulders to place plates in front of them, cleared the food away, brought them more drinks, asked if they wanted
anything
else. As the evening progressed the women seemed to touch them more often, a sliding rub on the shoulder, a bump from a toned hip, a flip of long, straight hair.

Sat had said, a bemused look on his face, “There’s no one quite like your wife though, Ram. You’re a lucky bastard.”

The others, Vish especially, had agreed, raising their glasses in a silent toast.

“So are you,” Ram had said. “You married the girl I love.”

In the present tense, and he thought they all realized it, but no one said anything.

And then Sat began a story about some friends of his in Mumbai who had formed something called a Key Club. The waitresses disappeared, the room grew quiet.

“What is the one thing we do not have?” Sat said. “The one thing money cannot buy for us? Something to think about, isn’t it?”

They did. They thought about it that night when they returned home to their sleeping wives and children, to hushed houses, to clocks that chimed the hour. Ram called Sat the next morning and said that he was in. Over the next few days they all called Sat. Although they were to be the members of the club, it could not exist without their wives’ consent. It took a year for all of the wives to agree. Sita was the last to submit. The club had met three times so far. Tonight is the fourth meeting.

There was one rule that had to be followed with diligence. The wives must not be influenced in their decisions; they must make their own picks, and they must be the ones to choose. Unsaid, and critical to the longevity of the club, was that the members of the club must accept whatever happened at the club meeting, and never talk about it.

“Why, Ram?” Sita asks again in the car as they approach the hotel.

So he tells her. And then, “Why ask now, Sita? You’ve been happy enough the last three times.”

He lets that slip without meaning to, and remembers now that Sita had glowed on every post–Key Club meeting Sunday. Oddly, to Ram, because he would never have thought that Vish … if anything, it was Sat he was afraid of. Sat who had first said that Sita was lovely, Sat who had come up with the idea of the club, who hoped each time that he would be picked. Sat who had married the woman Ram is in love with. And on each occasion as the time for the picking came, there were two thoughts that warred constantly in Ram. Who would choose him, and who Sita would choose. Not Sat, he thought each time, not Sat.

“Ram and Sita,” Sat says as they enter the private dinner lounge at the hotel. “You are late.”

They are all there. All sixteen of them with their made-up names—so that they can be tonight what they aren’t in their real lives. Ram chose their names for the Key Club after Ram and Sita from the
Ramayana.
A funny choice, Sita had said once, didn’t Ram exile his wife to the jungle when she was
pregnant with twins for the mere suspicion that she might have been unfaithful to him? And she had gone through an
Agni-Pariksha,
a literal trial by fire, walked through fire and come out unscathed to prove to him that she was still pure, still untouched by Ravana. What a fickle man he was, Sita had said. Funny you would choose his name for yours.

Ram hadn’t thought that far into the story, of course. In his mind was a brief memory from when he was ten years old, peering around the door of the drawing room late one night during a party his parents had hosted, and Vish’s father had passed behind his mother’s chair and stroked her back with his gin and tonic glass. Ram’s mother had shivered and bowed her head. Ram knew, and knew this with certainty only many years later, that Vish’s father and his mother had been having an affair. What his father thought of this, or if he even knew or cared, Ram did not know. So when the club was formed, he changed their names to Ram and Sita—Ram who had fought the demon king Ravana who had captured his wife, rescued her, and brought her home with him safely. A few years later the god Ram had let his wife go, but Ram
really
hadn’t thought that far into the story.

They are subdued tonight, the laughter is almost nonexistent, and they eat in silence, forks clinking on china plates. The lights dim when they finish eating. All the men reach into their pockets and bring out their car keys. Sometime, earlier in the evening, a waiter set a clear, cut-glass bowl in the
center of the table, and all through dinner it sits sparkling in the muted light.

There are eight rooms booked upstairs in the hotel— each identical, dark teak furniture, creamy white bedspreads, a view to the blue-green swimming pool and the lawns. Eight rooms, and there are eight card keys on the table now, which Vish removed from an envelope and fanned out over the table. He then deposits his car keys into the bowl. Ram does the same, and watches as Sat puts his keys in also. Sat glances at Sita, but she is looking at the mirrored surface of the table and not at him.

The women draw lots from another envelope. Sita’s number is seven. By the time her turn comes, Sara has already picked up Vy’s car keys from the cut-glass bowl, and the only two women remaining are Sita and Alistair’s wife. Sat and Vish are still unclaimed.

Ram’s head throbs. Not Sat, he thinks. Don’t pick Sat. The last three times, Sita chose Vish’s keys—chose to go with him and the card key to a room upstairs, chose to spend all of that Saturday night with him. She came back home the next day lit from within with an inner fire of satisfaction. But it is Sat who wants Sita, who is so desperate to sleep with Ram’s wife that he forms the club just for this chance that she might choose him also. Sat who stole Sara from Ram, and married her instead. Not Sat, please.

Sita reaches into the bowl, and her fingertips glow pink through the glass. When her hand comes out, she holds Vish’s keys.

Bedside Dreams

I watch as Parvati bends over Kamal, lifting his arm to tuck the sheet around his body. Her movements are gentle, as though she takes care of a child. She smoothes the fabric over him, then reaches out to even the hair on his forehead. Her fingers linger on the side of his still face, as if to absorb his warmth. She does this for me, I know, for then she looks up and winks. I smile slowly as she leaves the room. My gaze comes back to Kamal and pain scuttles inside me. This once-vibrant man is an empty shape lying on pale sheets that overpower his skin. Veins stand out on the fragile face I once covered with kisses. Somewhere in the chest a tentative breath catches his lungs, fills them briefly, and then flees.

I remember leaning over my first daughter a few days after her birth to check if she was breathing. My fingers would meet the little throb on the side of her head, or I
would hold my hand in front of her nose as her little breath condensed on my palm. This I did every night, many many times, waking from a deep sleep, feeling I must go to her. For Kamal, the man who gave me that daughter, I cannot do this. I can only watch over him. I can only guard him, knowing that inevitably one day even that shallow rise and fall of his ribs will stop.

This will last for a long time, they say. Why wait like this? Why stand vigil over an already empty bed? Do you notice, as you go through life, how many people think they have a say in it? How many people give you advice for various useless reasons? They’ve lived longer; they know better; they are just smarter. I, who have known this man more precisely than anyone else, can tell he will not last long. Until then, I will be here, by his side. And then he will be gone, his life extinguished after eighty-three years, sixty-seven of which we spent together, never apart for more than three days at a stretch.

I cannot talk to Kamal and I know he cannot hear me. In any case, we don’t need words anymore. A glance, a raised eyebrow, a smile, these are enough for us to communicate with after so many years of marriage; and in the early, turbulent years, we rarely had the time for talk anyway. When I was pregnant with our first daughter, I spent one night in jail for demonstrating on the streets the night the Indian Congress passed the Quit India resolution. 1942. I was sixteen years old. As we demanded the British leave India, they swept us haphazardly into overfull prisons. By
the next morning, they had started culling us out. I was let go first, my stomach round with the child, my face blanched from a sleepless night. Kamal, president of the local chapter of the Congress, had to stay in jail. Freed, he would create problems, for outside our little realm, beyond our burning purpose, the whole world raged in war.

I visited Kamal every day. We would sit on the floor at one end of the cell, leaning against the wall, iron bars separating us. But our shoulders touched, and if I leaned hard enough, I could put my head to his. For the next three years, Kamal made brief appearances at home, only to be yanked back to jail at the smallest pretext, sometimes leaving his dinner to cool as he left.

So when that child, our first daughter, was born in 1942, Kamal was still in jail. And when she died a month after her birth, Kamal still hadn’t seen her, hadn’t touched her. We have twelve other children. Now when all I do is wait, I wonder about the daughter who died, who we never named because I was waiting for Kamal to do so. I wonder if she would have been different.

My eyes cast over the chalky whitewashed walls within my range of vision and then to the beds lined in a military row along the sides of the room. Twelve to each side. This has been our home for the last twenty-three years, from the day Kamal retired from the Indian Railways as chief engineer.

I remember the day he was promoted from foreman to engine driver. He had come home, his face flushed and
handsome, tripped over three of the children, patted them absently, and then hugged me and my growing belly in his warm arms. As the children watched round-eyed, we danced around the room, the one room we could afford to rent then, where we ate, and slept, and made love. But all that changed that day. We rented another room.

Kamal’s job took him away from me more often now than before, but never for more than three days. Each time he left, I touched his face with cold lips and would not stop trembling until he returned. Such an attitude toward a husband was not healthy, they said, distance made a marriage work.
Love
was not a word to be used in public, rather to be implied—if I was asked whether I loved my husband, I must nod, or bow my head in agreement. But I must never love him too much—not enough to allow my whole self to be overcome by him. Before we were married, they came to me with advice. Listen to your husband, or pretend to do so, at least at first. He will do strange things to you under cover of darkness, but that is a woman’s lot in life. And make sure you provide him with many sons, they said, daughters are a burden. The dowries, the uncontrollable and demanding in-laws, the constant fear of one of them being spoiled (through her effort or not)—daughters, they said, were like milk left out on the kitchen countertop overnight.

I had met Kamal only once before we were married—as was the custom—when he came to see me with his parents and the marriage broker. I was sixteen; it seems young these days when girls do not marry until they are finished with
their college at least. But then, I was considered the right age for marriage—college was not possible (I had not even completed my schooling)—I was four years beyond puberty. Left alone too long without the tether of marriage, like the milk, I too might spoil. My mother made me dress up in a purple-and-gold silk sari she had kept for the occasion. I wore that sari three times, twice before Kamal came visiting. The other two times one prospective groom said I was too dark, the other thought me too tall. Kamal, no indecisive Goldilocks, found me just right. He later told me I glowed like a butterfly. I showed off my meager skills, twanging the
veena
strings until even my mother flinched, singing classical songs with a hoarse defiance until Kamal put a hand up to his mouth to hide a smile. My mother served them gold-tinted, saffron-scented
halwa
and lied as usual when she said I had made it. Kamal taught me to cook when we were married. But long before that, after he had said yes to me, there were tales of how I should be not just a good wife, but, eventually, a powerful one.