Oleander Girl (23 page)

The idea of selling the home that has belonged to the Roys for generations makes Sarojini’s heart tighten in repugnance. “You want to buy this house so you can tear it down?” she asks.

Saxena nods, watching her with his shrewd eyes. She need not worry about the temple, he says. It won’t be touched. He’s a good Hindu, and luckily it’s in the far corner of the compound, not in the way of the plans he’s drawn up. He shows her problems she hadn’t known to look for: loose bricks along the roof’s parapet, cracks in the foundation, appearing aboveground like roots gone wrong. Here and there, where the stucco has crumbled, the walls are damp with rot. A woman on her own, getting on in years, without income or know-how, would have a hard time repairing all this.

He has a point; Sarojini can’t deny that. She hides the stab of fear she feels and takes his card, telling him that she isn’t interested in selling right now. But she’ll keep him in mind if things change.

The man gives her an appraising look that makes Sarojini wonder how much he knows of her financial situation, and how he might have found out. “Do think about the offer, madam,” he says as he leaves. “Our company will give you a fair deal, not like others, who might try to cheat you.”

All day Sarojini frets about how she will come up with the extra money for the taxes and the repairs. Will she really have to sell the house she has lived in since she was a teenage bride? If the dead know and feel what goes on in the world of the living—and she believes they do—how distressed Bimal would be. He loved the old house as if it were a second body. Korobi loves it, too—and Rajat. If she can’t hold on to the mansion, she’ll be failing all three of them.

By dusk, when the bruised light wavers and the world seems to collapse upon itself, Sarojini is exhausted and fretful. She ignores Cook’s pleas to eat a little something and retreats to her bed. That is a mistake. The bed reminds her of Korobi, who had crept into it the night before
she left for America and in silence put her arms around her. Sarojini is annoyed at how keenly she feels her granddaughter’s absence. She reminds herself that the girl will be away only for a few more weeks, but her body refuses to understand. Her insides feel distended with loss; no wonder she has no space for food. It is beginning to feel the way it did when Anu left, that gaping hole, that feeling as if her heart had gone to America with her child. She hasn’t spoken to Korobi in a week—something to do with the time difference and Korobi not having a phone of her own and staying in a place where she can’t talk freely. Though Sarojini gets news of her from Rajat, it doesn’t quite assuage her anxiety or slake her longing to hear her granddaughter’s voice. Now she lies on her vacant marriage bed, which seems as vast as the ocean and as unstable, and contemplates the unexpected turns her life has taken. Who would have thought, on that beautiful engagement morning filled with songbirds and swaying oleanders, that in less than two months their little family would be scattered like this?

Fast on the heels of that thought comes another, one that she has been pushing away since Korobi told her about the journey. What if Korobi doesn’t return when her month is up? What if she chooses to remain with her father once she finds him? Fear makes Sarojini light-headed. Her bedclothes wind about her with suffocating intentness. Her heart feels like a pomegranate about to burst. Out of the black whirlpool of her mind another idea rises: Would it be such a terrible thing to die? To go where Bimal and Anu, reconciled now, wait for her? She tilts her head toward the chair where her husband liked to sit and thinks she sees his silhouette, waiting with more patience than he’d ever had while alive.

She opens her hands and feels her life beginning to slip through them. It is an easy movement, like a silk rope being pulled out of her. But when the rope almost reaches its end, she is caught by a knot:
I can’t leave Korobi, not until she’s married and has someone to share her grief
. And then another:
I need to know—who was the man Anu loved?
And finally:
Bimal died wanting forgiveness. I must try to obtain it for him.
She gropes around the bedside table with frantic fingers for her box of glucose tablets. Finally, finally, there they are. She slides two under her tongue, shuts her eyes tight. In a while she feels her breath easing. She sits up shakily,
switches on the table lamp, finds the packet of biscuits she keeps in a drawer, chews her way carefully through four of them. She drinks a full glass of water and falls into a dreamless sleep.

Waking next morning, she isn’t sure if she had truly been close to death, or if it was just a hallucination. Either way, something in her has shifted. She feels she has been given an extended lease for a reason. Infused with new determination, she goes over the monthly expenses. She combs through the bankbooks that Bimal had left, willing herself to make sense of his scribbles. She phones her lawyer and then the bank to find out the details of Bimal’s pension. It is a substantial amount. Why then do they have so little money? She makes careful notes on a pad. If she cuts down on everything she can think of, will she be able to keep the house?

She enlists Bahadur and Cook in her mission. Cook decrees that she will make only one dal and one vegetable for their meals. A little rice, a few chapatis. No more of that expensive Darjeeling tea. They’ll switch to plain black. She goes around the house like a policeman on a beat, turning off lights and fans in empty rooms. Bahadur threatens the gardener boy with dire consequences if he catches him watering the plants even a minute longer than necessary. He contracts with a local vendor to harvest the jaam trees in the backyard—they have too many, and every year heaps of luscious purple fruit lie rotting on the ground.

Sarojini’s job is to make an inventory of heirlooms that can be sold: the ancient, handmade mahogany furniture of which there is so much in the spare bedrooms; the heavy brass dishes used on feast days in Bimal’s grandfather’s time. She starts with the china and the silver; her mother-in-law had a weakness for expensive British tea services, many of which have never been used.

She is admiring a gold-rimmed pink cup, so thin that light shines through it, when the phone rings. She hurries to the machine, her heart hammering with hope, and there, finally, is her granddaughter, her words tumbling over each other as they did when she made her monthly call from boarding school. Sarojini tries to control her sudden tears.

“Grandma, I’m sorry I couldn’t call earlier! I have so much to tell you, but I didn’t have a phone. I miss you! Are you okay, all alone?”

“I’m fine. Rajat calls me every day and comes over whenever he can. He’s a special young man, that one. He tells me all your news, too.”

“Now that I have my phone, I’ll call you every day, promise.”

A shiver goes through Sarojini. “Don’t promise, shona. Promises only lead to trouble. Tell me all about what you did today so that for once I can surprise Rajat with your news!”

She listens mostly for the sound of her granddaughter’s voice, waterfall and rainbow mixed together, describing how she ate lunch in Desai’s surprisingly large and airy kitchen, with African violets on the windowsill because they used to be his dead wife’s favorite flowers. That’s why he never moved out of that place even though the neighborhood went bad—because it was where they started their married life. And then Vic, Desai’s nephew, took her sightseeing to calm her down because she’s so nervous—wasn’t that kind? She’s nervous because she’s going up to Boston tomorrow to meet the architect who might turn out to be her father. What if he doesn’t like her?

“Not like you!” Sarojini scoffs. “Impossible.”

“You’re biased! Besides, what if I don’t like him?”

Sarojini doesn’t have a response to that.

“Vic took me to the top of the Empire State Building. I’d always wanted to go there! Do you know, I’ve never been sightseeing in my life!”

Sarojini wants to protest, but then she realizes it’s true. In Kolkata, the child only saw those attractions—the Shaheed Minar, Howrah Bridge—that were situated along roads she traveled for other reasons. In the city of one’s birth, one can never be a tourist. Sarojini tries to visualize the spaces her granddaughter is traveling through, the smell of the new dish, the exact purple of the flowers, the city radiating out from the foot of the Empire State Building in every direction. Wherever you turned, skyscrapers sprouted, housing lives and histories beyond your ability to imagine. To the left, a river; beyond that, the start of an ocean. Ahead, the green gash of Central Park, beautiful and dangerous. The cold, exhilarating wind whipping her granddaughter’s hair into her face. She is glad Korobi is getting to see something of the world, for this moment of respite in a minefield of uncertainty. Why then the prick, like a thorn beneath her skin?

She catches a different note in Korobi’s voice, a hesitation. “Vic and I, we’re going to pretend to be newlyweds, looking for an architect to build a home for us. That’s how we were able to make an appointment with him.”

Sarojini is shocked. “Does Rajat know about this—this pretense?”

There’s a pause. “I didn’t tell him. I knew he’d be angry—nowadays he gets angry so easily—even though it doesn’t mean anything. I didn’t want to get into a fight right before my trip to Boston. It bothers me that I have to hide an innocent detail like this from the man I’m planning to spend my life with. But don’t say anything to Rajat. He won’t understand, and I don’t want to add to his stress. He’s already going through so much at the warehouse.”

Twin spirals of worry twinge through Sarojini. Something in the girl’s tone, in her need to explain her innocence, bespeaks trouble. And what’s this about problems at Rajat’s work? Why has he kept it from Sarojini? Oh, these young people, with their penchant for secrets.

“Grandma, are you upset with me?”

Sarojini sighs. “No,” she says, but she’s not being completely honest. To change the subject, she adds, “So you finally got your phone.”

“Yes! I must tell you how. When I got back to the apartment, Seema was lying on the couch with a quilt pulled up to her neck, looking like she’d been there all day. I cajoled her into coming for a walk—just a little one, because it scares her to leave the apartment. She didn’t want to, but I insisted that she needed to get some fresh air for the baby’s sake. On the way I saw her looking at some mangoes in a bin outside a store, so I bought a couple because she doesn’t have much money. We were eating mangoes and laughing about something silly when Mitra walked in. I became quiet because he is such a grinch, but Seema told him all about the walk and how the baby must have liked being outside, he kicked and kicked. Mitra didn’t say anything; he just called her into the bedroom. I thought he was going to shout at her for going out with me—he loses his temper with her quite often, though I do believe he loves her in his way. But when she came out, she was holding a package in her hands, and it was my cell phone! Do you think he had it all this while and wouldn’t give it to me, just to spite the Boses?
But today when he saw I’d made his wife so happy, he changed his mind?”

“Best not try to figure out such things, shona. It’ll only drive you crazy. Your grandfather was that way, always analyzing, trying to learn what people were like underneath their faces. Me, I say, who can tell what’s in a man’s heart? You have the phone. That’s enough.”

“I forgot to tell you.” Korobi’s voice dips into a whisper. “I asked Vic to take me to the Boses’ gallery. It was a shock. The place looks abandoned. I got down from the car and peered through the front door. The lights were off, and dust covered everything, thick enough that I could see no one had been in there for a while. No wonder there haven’t been any sales lately! Worse, there were quite a few blank spaces on the wall—not just the couple I’d expected from what Seema had told me about the vandalism. It’s as though someone’s been removing the paintings.”

Sarojini doesn’t like the sound of this. “Maybe you went to the wrong place?”

“It said Mumtaz, in gold letters right above the door. I was so angry. All this time the Boses have been trusting Mitra, paying him extra to turn the business around, losing money every day. And he’s cheating them. I need to tell them what’s going on, but I’m afraid.”

Sarojini’s knees feel weak. She has to sit down. She has a bad feeling about the whole business, and Mitra in particular. If the Boses confront him, Mitra would know Korobi told them. What might he do in retaliation?

“Shona, don’t say anything to the Boses until you get back from your trip.”

“Okay. In any case, Vic will help me figure out what to do. I’ll bring it up on my way back from Boston. He’s really smart. Even Mr. Desai, who has so much experience, listens to him. And he’s funny, too. The other day when I got really frustrated from making those useless phone queries, he made this hilarious joke—”

Sarojini does not like how her granddaughter’s voice sparks with enthusiasm when she speaks of Vic. “Be careful,” she interrupts.

“I will! Don’t worry!”

Sentences swirl inside Sarojini’s head.
Remember who you are. Remember the world that waits for you here, its privileges and obligations. What happens in America isn’t your life; it’s only an interlude.
Who had said those words? It was Bimal, at the airport. Anu had touched his feet and said,
I will
. She had said,
Don’t worry!

“I love you, Grandma. I got to go now. I’ll use up all my minutes otherwise. Wish me good luck in Boston.”

When she was a child in her parents’ home, a bee had once bitten Sarojini’s face. Her lips had swollen up. For a whole day, she could hardly speak. Her mouth feels like that right now. What is good luck for Korobi? Sarojini is no longer sure. The best she can do is to say, with stiff effort, “I pray the goddess keeps you on the righteous path.”