Oleander Girl (11 page)

“Every day when your grandfather was at work, I wept, certain that I would never see Anu again. But I said nothing to him. That was the way I had been brought up. If he noticed my swollen eyes when he came home, he said nothing, either. Perhaps that was the way he had been brought up.

“About six months later, your grandfather came home, highly agitated. Anu had written that she was expecting a baby. The pregnancy was not going well. She was often sick and missed us terribly. Would we allow her to come and see us?

“All the feelings I’d dammed up for so long burst over me: joy at the news, anxiety for Anu’s health, sorrow that she had to beg to visit her own home. I told your grandfather that this was our chance to make up with Anu. We had to put the past behind us and welcome her back. I was prepared to fight him as I’d never done before. I was even prepared to go to Anu if he refused to let her visit. But your grandfather surprised me. He phoned her the very next day and said she could come and stay as long as she liked. His only stipulation was that she come alone and speak to no one, not even me, about her husband while she was here.

“Anu must have missed us more than we guessed. She agreed to your grandfather’s terms. Two weeks later, she flung herself into my arms at the airport, her face thinner, darker, with worry lines between her brows
that she hadn’t had when she left. Her belly pushed against me—I guessed her to be at least five months along. As I kissed her, I felt you kick. That night, after she had eaten a good dinner of rice and Ilish fish and gone to sleep in her childhood bed, your grandfather said, ‘We should never have let her go.’ But I was silent. I had felt that kick and fallen in love already. I couldn’t wish you into nonbeing.

“The next two months were the happiest in my life. Your grandfather had made it clear that he didn’t want Anu to leave the house. I thought she might chafe at such a restriction, but she didn’t seem to mind. In those months, to keep Anu company, I, too, stopped going out. We were suspended in a magical space into which the outside world could not intrude. She followed me around contentedly, chatting about her childhood, small incidents from long ago. Once in a while, she would start to speak and then stop, a shadow passing over her face. I guessed she had been about to say something about Rob, your father. I longed to know what it might be and tried, gently, to get her to tell me. I wished she would break that ridiculous promise your grandfather had exacted from her, but she never did. That was the kind of person she was.

“In the third month of her visit, the problems began. Your grandfather started to inquire into hospitals, though Anu had told him that she wanted to have the baby in America. Every night at dinner he would try to persuade her to stay, while she maintained an increasingly stubborn silence. The glow that had come upon her faded. She ate less; at night I could hear her pacing in her bedroom. Finally she told us she had fixed the date for her departure—it would be in three days. She couldn’t delay any further; the airline had restrictions on how far along a pregnant passenger could be.

“Now it was your grandfather who refused to speak. He was the one who paced the bedroom, keeping me awake. I told him we had to accept Anu’s wishes. She was grown and married now. He turned on me with frightening fury, telling me to shut up.

“Next morning, however, he had calmed down. He took a day off from work and took Anu shopping. Although she protested, he went into Mallik’s and bought an entire layette for you. He chose the softest, most expensive things and had the towels embroidered with flowery
K
s
because she had already told us the names she had picked out: Kartik for a boy, Korobi for a girl. Anu, on her part, was at her sweetest, hugging us and thanking us for everything we’d done.

“ ‘Thanking your parents!’ your grandfather said gruffly. ‘Don’t talk like an American!’ But he hugged her back, and I was grateful that he had accepted the inevitable.

“The night before she was to leave, however, while I was in the kitchen supervising a special dinner, they had another fight. I couldn’t hear the details above the whistle of the pressure cooker. I know there was a cry, a series of thuds. By the time Cook and I came running from the kitchen, your mother was crumpled at the base of the stairs, unconscious, with you folded helplessly somewhere inside her. Your grandfather stood on the landing above, frozen. All he would say in answer to my anguished questions was that she had tripped.

“It would take me a year to get more than that out of him—he was a lawyer, after all. Even then, all he said was that he had gone into her room and asked her one more time to put off her journey. She had refused and, when he persisted, rushed from the room in anger. I guessed that he must have said other things—perhaps something against your father. Maybe he had followed, haranguing her. In her haste to get away, she had pushed past him and fallen.”

“It was because of him she fell, wasn’t it?” Korobi whispers, words Sarojini couldn’t bring herself to say all these years. “If it wasn’t for his stubbornness, his inability to accept a no, she might have lived. Did she say anything to you before she died? About my dad, about me?”

Sarojini shakes her head. “We rushed her to the hospital, but she never did regain consciousness. By the time the doctors operated on her and got you out, she was dead.”

“Dead!” Korobi echoes. “Just like that?”

Sarojini nods, wiping her eyes. “When we came back to the hospital after the funeral, you were in intensive care, inside an incubator, a bandage tied over your eyes, tubes sticking into you. Oh, how frighteningly small you were. We weren’t allowed to touch you for fear of infection. Looking at you, I couldn’t stop crying. I was so afraid you would die, too, and we would have no one, nothing to tie your mother to us. That
night your grandfather took me to our temple and told me that your father must never learn you were alive. If he did, he would take you away.

“ ‘We’ll grow old in an empty house while she is brought up in another country without culture or values,’ he said. ‘Do you want that?’

“I shook my head.

“ ‘Then swear on the goddess that you’ll never contact him—or tell her about him.’

“I felt only a moment’s compunction. I had no love for the stranger who had snatched our daughter from us. And I agreed with your grandfather: it would be the best thing for you.

“Later, as you grew and began asking about your mother and father, I would have my doubts, but I couldn’t say anything, not until I became the only keeper of your secret.”

The two women sit in silence, musing over the words that reverberate around them, words that have been waiting all these years to be born. What emotions are going through Korobi? Sarojini wonders. She tries to look into her granddaughter’s face, but Korobi keeps it carefully turned away.

“Tell me about my father now.”

Sarojini shakes her head helplessly. “I’ve told you everything I know. That’s why I was going through your grandfather’s things. I thought there might have been a letter or photographs. Maybe a copy of a marriage certificate. But if there was, he destroyed it long ago.”

“But didn’t my father come to India, looking for my mother? For me? They were in love!”

“No. Your grandfather sent him a telegram saying you were both dead.”

“He told my father
what
?” Korobi’s voice is furious.

Sarojini looks shamefaced, as though she herself had initiated the falsehood. “He told him not to come, that we were barely able to cope with the tragedy and to talk to him would only increase our distress. As an extra precaution, as soon as the hospital released you, he sent you and me to our village home along with Cook and Bahadur and moved into a hotel himself, closing up the house. The story he gave out to his
friends and even to our servants was that your father—a certain Bhowmik, a brilliant young law student in America—had died tragically in a car crash some months back. A pregnant Anu had come home to be comforted by us. Brokenhearted, she had shut herself up in the house, refusing to meet anyone, begging us not to inform anyone of what had happened. She couldn’t even bear to mention her husband’s name. And then, just as she was feeling better, fate had struck her down, too.

“For the first year of your life, you and I lived in the village, in our ancestral home, which was falling to pieces. When it rained, Cook had to place buckets under the leaks. We never left the house. Bahadur spread the rumor that I was recovering from tuberculosis. That kept the curious away. Once a month your grandfather came to see us. He spent most of his visits holding you, just looking at you. The pent-up love he had for Anu, I think he transferred it all to you during those days.”

Korobi looks away. Sarojini knows that this is what hurts her granddaughter the most. Not just the deception, but that it came from the man she’d trusted more than anyone else in her life.

“I don’t expect you to forgive us for deceiving you. All I can say is that we did it out of love—and fear. And once we had woven the story, we, too, were caught in it. We didn’t know how to cut ourselves loose.”

The day is gone. Sarojini peers through the gloom of evening at Korobi, hoping for a sign of pardon. But her face is dark and hard, closed up tight like a walnut. Silence stretches between them, punctuated only by the call of birds returning to their nests. Sarojini thinks this silence will go on forever, until she crumbles into dust. She would welcome that: to disintegrate, to blow away in the wind, to never have to answer the look in her granddaughter’s eye.

Downstairs, the phone rings.

Neither Sarojini nor Korobi moves. Finally, Cook hurries from the kitchen, grumbling loudly, and picks it up.

“It’s Rajat-babu,” she yells up. “Calling to talk to baby. What shall I say?”

Sarojini puts her hand on her granddaughter’s arm. “Don’t talk to him right now. Don’t say anything until you’ve calmed down. Maybe it’s
best not to tell him any of this. It’ll do no good. And it might lead to a host of problems.”

The stiff angle of Korobi’s neck. Anger, sorrow, disappointment, distaste—Sarojini can’t count all the things it conveys.

“You want me to hide such a big thing from the man I’m about to marry? You want me to perpetuate the lie you and Grandfather concocted? You want me, too, to deny my father?”

Korobi rushes from the room as though she can’t bear to be near Sarojini. Almost as though she wants to tumble down those same stairs to join her mother, Sarojini thinks, holding her breath until she hears her granddaughter pick up the phone and say hello.

By the river in the yellow light of the deserted streetlamp, Rajat holds his sobbing fiancée and tries to comfort her. But he can’t find the right words—he’s too shocked by the astounding news she’s just told him. He starts to say that he can imagine what she must be going through, being lied to like this, but then he stutters to a stop. The truth is, he can’t imagine it at all. It chagrins him, this failure of empathy. Perhaps it’s because the news ambushed him so unexpectedly. He’d called the Roy home to tell Korobi that he wouldn’t be able to see her tonight. He needed to spend some time with his family, whom he’d been neglecting shamefully since Bimal Roy’s death. Even at the height of his infatuation with Sonia he had managed to carve out more time for them. His mother hadn’t complained—that was not her way. But last night he got home to find Pia lying on the sofa, where she had fallen asleep waiting for him to return. Awakened, she had rubbed at her eyes plaintively and said she never got to see him these days. Struck by compunction, he promised her that he would have dinner at home tonight, maybe even play a game of Scrabble afterward. He was surprised by how happy it made him to plan a relaxed evening with his family. But when he’d talked to Korobi, the feverish intensity of her voice had worried him. He had come—as she requested—as soon as he could.

“I’m very sorry. . . .”

Even to his ears, the words sound inadequate, equivocal. What exactly is he sorry for? Sorry that her grandfather had betrayed her, that he might have contributed to her mother’s death? That she’d been lied to about her father for all these years? Yes, of course. But isn’t he also sorry that she has now found out about her father? Certainly it would have been simpler had Rajat not been handed this strange, sudden father-in-law, a foreigner shrouded in a conspiracy of silence. He can’t help wondering what reason Bimal Roy, a canny man if ever there was one, might have had for cutting Rob out of Korobi’s life so completely.

“It’s hard for me to believe that Grandfather was so harsh to my mother. If only he’d accepted my father—or at least not pressured her to remain in India—she would still be alive. And I’d have grown up with both my parents.”

Rajat makes a sympathetic sound.
If only
is a dangerous path to travel. But it’s no use trying to tell Korobi that right now.

“What hurts even more is knowing that my grandparents—whom I loved more than anybody—would deceive me like this! It hurts so much.”

Something twists inside Rajat. He thinks, unwillingly, of Sonia. How well he knows, from his own life, what Korobi is describing, that feeling as though the solid earth has turned to shifting sands beneath his feet.