Oleander Girl (2 page)

She hasn’t come to learn about me. All the things I said to her—she
probably knew them already, being dead. She has appeared now, instead, to tell me something.

But what?

“Talk to me, Mother.”

This time when she turns to me, I notice that my dream mother has no mouth. She points again.

“There’s something out there you want? Beyond the ocean?”

She nods. Her face is glowing because I’ve finally understood. Now she points at me.

“You want me to go and get it?”

She nods.

“Where must I go? What am I to look for?”

My mother’s frame shivers with effort as though she longs to speak. She begins to dissolve. I can glimpse the ocean through her tattered body, waves breaking apart on rocks. An urgent sorrow radiates from her disappearing form. Then she is gone, and I am finally awake, blinking in the first rays of the sun entering the room through the bars.

I need someone to interpret this dream. It means something, I’m sure of that, coming at this crucial moment in my life. I can’t go to Grandfather. When my mother died, he destroyed all her photographs because he couldn’t bear to look at them. When I was six, he told me never to bring her up. It was too painful.

I imagined it at night when I lay in bed, alone with my longing: that sharp, silver word,
mother,
like a chisel, chipping away at Grandfather’s heart.

Perhaps I can tell my dream to Grandmother. She, too, is reluctant to speak of my mother—but she can be cajoled.

The household at 26 Tarak Prasad Roy Road has been abustle since daybreak, preparing for the engagement. The maid has ground the spices for the celebratory lunch and chopped a mountain of vegetables. The yawning cook has cut up the rui fish and marinated it in salt and turmeric. In
the Durga mandir, the family temple established over a hundred years ago, old Bahadur yells threats at the gardener boy until the cracked marble floor is mopped to his satisfaction. There Sarojini hurries to arrange lamps, camphor holders, incense, sandalwood powder, marigolds, large copper platters, fruit, milk sweets, rice grains, gold coins, and multicolored pictures depicting a pantheon of gods. Is she forgetting anything? She loves the temple, but it also makes her nervous. Too many memories lurk in its sooty alcoves.

On one side she has unrolled mats for the priest and for her husband, Bimal Prasad Roy, retired barrister and proud grandfather of the bride-to-be; on the other she has placed four low chairs. The chairs, which have been the cause of some contention, are for the Boses, family of the groom-to-be, because they are modern and elegant and thus unused to sitting cross-legged on the ground.

Bimal had been dead set against such westernized nonsense. “For generations we’ve been praying on the floor. They can’t do it for one day? Sacrifice a little comfort for the goddess’s blessing?”

But ultimately Sarojini, who has had ample opportunity over fifty-five years of marriage to perfect her cajoling, had prevailed.

Reentering the house, Sarojini is swept into a sea of commotion. The milkman is rattling the side door; the phone rings; on the Akashbani Kalikata radio station, the newscaster announces the date: Feburary 27, 2002; Cook berates the neighbor’s striped cat for attempting to filch a piece of fish. Bimal summons Cook in querulous tones. Where on earth is his morning tea? His Parle-G biscuits? Cook replies (but not loud enough for Bimal to hear) that she doesn’t have ten arms like the goddess. The commentator on Akashbani, who is discussing the growing tension between India and Pakistan since the testing of the Agni missile, is interrupted by a news bulletin: over fifty people dead in a train fire in Gujarat.

So many disasters in the world, Sarojini thinks as she climbs the stairs to Korobi’s bedroom. A pity that one had to happen today, a day of more happiness than their family has seen in a long time. She opens the door to Korobi’s room to help her granddaughter get ready for the ceremony.

There’s the girl, dawdling on the veranda in her thin nightgown for all the world to gawk at! Sarojini is about to scold her, but, leaning over the rail toward the row of oleanders that Anu had loved, Korobi looks so like her dead mother that the words die in Sarojini’s throat. Not her face or fair skin—in those Korobi resembles Sarojini herself, but that posture, that troublesome yearning toward the world, that radiant smile as she turns toward Sarojini.

In any case, Sarojini is no good at scolding. Bimal has always complained that she spoiled the girls—first Anu and then little Korobi—and thus did them a disservice. Sarojini admits he has a point; girls have to be toughened so they can survive a world that presses harder on women, and surely Bimal does a good job of that. But deep in a hidden place inside her that is stubborn as a mudfish, Sarojini knows she is right, too. Being loved a little more than necessary arms a girl in a different way.

“Come on now, Korobi, bathwater’s getting cold.”

Not that Sarojini had much of an opportunity to spoil Korobi. As soon as the girl was five, Bimal made arrangements with that boarding school in the freezing mountains. Sarojini begged to keep the child at home. She even wept, which was uncommon for her, and mortifying. After Anu’s death she had vowed to keep her griefs to herself.

“Look what happened the last time I listened to you,” Bimal said.

A rejoinder shot up to her tongue.
Whose fault is it that my daughter’s dead?
At the last moment she pulled it back into herself. If the words had crystallized into being, she couldn’t have continued living with Bimal, she couldn’t have borne it. But she didn’t know any other way of being. Also this: she loved him. His suffering stung her. Yes, he suffered for Anu’s death, though he would not speak of it. Even now he startles awake at night with a groan, and lying next to him, Sarojini hears—sometimes for an hour—the ragged, sleepless thread of his breathing.

But this is no time for morbid thoughts. Luncheon smells rise from the kitchen—khichuri made with golden mung and gopal bhog rice from their ancestral village, sautéed brinjals, cabbage curry cooked with pure ghee and cardamoms. Sarojini will have to supervise the fish fry. Last time Cook, who is getting old, scorched the fillets and collapsed into tears. But first Sarojini must get Korobi dressed. The child is always
dreaming. Listen to her now, singing with abandon in the bathroom as though it were a holiday.

Sarojini knocks on the bathroom door. “Hurry, hurry, so much to be done. Sari, hair, makeup, jewelry. The mustard-seed ceremony to avert the evil eye. If you’re not ready by the time Rajat’s party arrives, your grandfather will have a fit.”

While Korobi was away at school, all year Sarojini would hunger for winter break, when icicles hung from the eaves of the old school buildings and the children were sent down to the plains. But somehow when Korobi came home, the two of them never got to do the things Sarojini had planned. To share the special recipes that she was famed for, to pass down secrets her own mother had given her. It seemed that whenever she tried to teach Korobi how to make singaras stuffed with cauliflower, or layer the woolens with camphor balls to save them from moths, Bimal called the girl away to play chess or accompany him to the book fair. In between, armies of tutors invaded the house, dinning the next year’s curriculum into Korobi so she could be the top student in her class. Korobi didn’t complain; she adored her grandfather and wanted him to be proud of her.

When Sarojini ventured to suggest that Korobi needed time to be a child, Bimal said, “You want to ruin her brain quite completely?”

Only at bedtime did Sarojini get her granddaughter to herself. “Tell me about Ma,” the girl would whisper in the dark, the forbidden request forging a bond between them. Sarojini would swallow the ache in her throat and offer Korobi something innocuous: a childhood escapade, a favorite color, a half-remembered line from a poem that Anu liked to recite.

“Why did she name me Korobi?’

“Because she loved oleanders so much, shona.”

“But they’re poisonous! You told me so. Why would she name me after something so dangerous?”

Sarojini didn’t know the answer to that.

Now Korobi is getting married, leaving Sarojini struggling under the weight of unsaid things, things she had promised Bimal she would never speak of.

She pushes the thought away, unfolding the stiff pink silk sari she had bought, so many years ago, for Anu. She tucks it around her granddaughter’s slender waist, admonishing the girl when she fidgets, making sure the pleats are straight and show off the gold-embroidered border. When Sarojini is satisfied, she starts on the jewelry—her beloved dowry jewelry, which she made Bimal get out of the bank vault, even though he had fussed and said it was quite unnecessary. She pins the gold disk in the shape of a sunburst to Korobi’s braid and stands back to evaluate. The girl has lovely hair, not that she takes care of it. Mostly it’s left untied, a mass of tangled curls cascading down her back. Where she got those curls, Sarojini can’t figure out. Everyone else in the family has stick-straight hair.

The long necklace with a crescent-shaped diamond pendant, the earrings so solid they have to be supported by little chains that hook to Korobi’s hair. The two-headed-snake armband fits perfectly around her upper arm. Sarojini had hoped to do this for Anuradha at her wedding. But Anu had married in America, and Sarojini’s going there had been out of the question. Each piece has its name: mantasha, chandra chur, makar bala. Not many people know them anymore. Sarojini had tried to teach Korobi, but the girl wasn’t interested.

Rajat, though, surprised Sarojini. Last week he had come to take Korobi for a ride in his new BMW, but he ended up sitting on Sarojini’s bed for a half hour, touching each piece, listening to its story. That disk belonged to my widow aunt, who left it behind when she ran away. My father gave this necklace to my mother when my oldest brother was born. My great-grandfather the gambler won the snake band from a neighboring landowner while playing pasha.

That evening when Korobi returned from the ride, Sarojini said, “You’re lucky to get him for a husband. He cares about history and tradition, about spending time with an old lady.”

“Excuse me, I thought he was the lucky one!”

Sarojini laughed along with her granddaughter, but secretly she hoped Rajat would cancel out all the tragedies that had piled up in the girl’s life already.

Asif Ali maneuvers the gleaming Mercedes down the labyrinthine lanes of Old Kolkata with consummate skill, but his passengers, occupied as they are with the day’s engagement festivities, do not notice how smoothly he avoids potholes, cows, and beggars, how skillfully he sails through aging yellow lights to get the Bose family to their destination on time. This disappoints Asif only a little; in his six years of chauffeuring the rich and callous, he has realized that to them, servants are invisible. Until they make a mistake, that is. Let Asif jerk to a halt because a brainless pedestrian has suddenly stepped in front of his car, and he would hear plenty from Memsaab right away.

Not that Asif is complaining. The Boses are a definite improvement from his previous employers. For one, they aren’t stingy. (It is an unceasing wonder to Asif how ingeniously tightfisted the rich can be toward servants.) He gets overtime if Barasaab comes back from a business trip at night, or if Memsaab stays late at a party, both of which happen with heartening regularity. They might grumble a bit, but they never cut his pay when he asks for time off on Muslim holy days, and they tip handsomely when they’re pleased about something. Especially Rajat-saab, though since he acquired his BMW, Asif hasn’t seen much of him. Rajat-saab gave him five hundred rupees the night he proposed to Korobi-madam.