Sister of My Heart (15 page)

The cups are quite beautiful, painted on the inside with dragons, so that each sip you take uncovers a little more of their green, glittery scales.

“A traveling Chinese prince gave them to your grandfather,” says Pishi. “He said the dragons had special powers. If you could please them, they would grant you a wish.”

“How would you please them?” Sudha asks. All these years, and she’s still the girl who believed in falling stars and demons.

“He wouldn’t tell us that. He said we each had to discover it for ourselves. Otherwise the wish wouldn’t work.”

“Nice trick!” I mutter. But when my cup’s empty, I stare at the dragon inside. That’s how foolish I’ve grown in my desperation. The dragon’s wings seem to flutter, just a little. Its ruby eye gleams. Perhaps it’s a cousin of the magic serpents of Sudha’s tale? Make my mother well, I command it. But my tone isn’t right. Offended, the dragon flicks its tail at me and turns back into porcelain.

Toward the end of the evening, the mothers discuss prospective bridegrooms. We aren’t allowed to be present at these discussions.
The mothers don’t want to fill our heads with romantic ideas which might come to nothing. Once the men have been screened and initial talks conducted, we’ll be given details of the lucky ones.

So when the song hour ends, Aunt N says in a falsely jovial voice, “Now run along, children.” Pishi unlocks the Godrej safe that stands in the corner and takes out several thick yellow envelopes addressed in the matchmaker’s spindly writing, and the mothers draw close to examine the offers one more time.

“I think we should see them too,” I said once. “Maybe the ones you choose aren’t the ones
we’d
like.”

Pishi looked undecided, but Aunt said, “Precisely. You’d like all the unsuitable ones, and then we’d have weeks of arguments.”

“Trust us, Anju,” said Mother. “We want your happiness even more than you do.”

What could I say after that?

From what I’ve overheard Aunt N say to the teatime aunties, so far the offers have been disappointing. Maybe the mothers have set their standards too high. Or maybe nowadays smart men don’t want marriages arranged by some old fogey of a matchmaker. Personally, I don’t care if the process takes years. Perhaps I could cajole the mothers into letting me attend college meanwhile? But then I hear Mother coughing anxiously, a thin, tearing sound. I see the strain lines around her mouth, like cracks in porcelain, and I’m ashamed of my selfishness.

Sudha’s anxious too. She won’t talk about it, but I know she’s wondering if Ashok’s proposal is sitting in the almirah in one of those yellow envelopes. Surely the mothers wouldn’t discard it without telling us? Or did his parents decide not to make an offer at all?

As the months pass and I watch her eyes grow haunted and sooty, my sympathy for Ashok begins to fade. I wonder angrily
whether Ashok even told his parents about Sudha. Maybe he was only in love with the idea of being in love. It was enough for him to play-act the wan hero who waits by the roadside for his beloved’s chariot to pass by. Perhaps marriage was never a part of it.

Tonight Sudha sits on my windowsill and stares out at the September night where white clouds glide like carefree swans. We’ve started a few halfhearted conversations, then broken them off distractedly.

Soon it’ll be the month of Durga Puja, which is considered unsuitable for weddings, and all talks will stop for a while. So far Mother has shown us only two offer letters. One was an old zamidar family like ours; the other had received a title fifty years back from the British. Both families were quite aware of their importance and their sons’ impeccable marital credentials. Pompous asses, in fact. Mother must have felt that too, for when we begged her to say no she didn’t disagree. Even Aunt N went along with the decision, though in her typical way she reminded us that Calcutta was filled with spinsters who wept every night into their pillows, regretting their earlier finickiness.

When I see how thin Mother has grown, how she stoops over the cane she’s recently started using, I feel a balled-up rage swelling in my throat until I think I’ll choke on it. She tried hard to keep her illness a secret, but that’s impossible in this city of a million watching eyes. Maybe that’s why we aren’t getting offers for the bookstore. They’re waiting like vultures for us to grow desperate. And why we aren’t getting good marriage offers either. Wives must be good breeding stock, and people don’t want to have anything to do with hereditary diseases.

I’m jerked back to the present by the sound of Sudha weeping softly. I go to her and rub her back, wishing I could make her feel better. Helpless fury drives me to clichés.
That blithering idiot
, I think.
That lily-livered coward. What on earth is he doing
? It
makes me even angrier when I remember I was the reason they met in the first place.

“Listen,” I tell Sudha. “I’ll go to Mother and tell her about you and Ashok, how much you care about him, how you wouldn’t be happy marrying anyone else. If she’s concerned about him being from a different caste, I’ll remind her of Priya Aunty’s son who went to Oxford and brought back a British wife, and now look how everyone adores her.”

Sudha stops crying. Her eyes widen. She’s listening very carefully.

“I’ll ask if Ashok’s family made an offer, and if they haven’t, I’ll ask Mother to approach them. And if they aren’t interested in our proposal, then we can put the whole thing behind us and go on with our lives, knowing we did our—”

“No!” Sudha says with startling energy. “I don’t want you saying anything to Gouri Ma.”

“But why? You love him, right? All this waiting’s making you crazy, right? Why shouldn’t I ask her then? Why should we women always wait for things to happen to us?”

“No, Anju. If Ashok really loves me, if he really wants to marry me, he’s got to make the first move.”

Really, Sudha can be so stubborn. “This isn’t the time for false pride,” I tell her. “Besides, how do you know he hasn’t?”

“Well, if they’ve turned down his offer, he’s got to come up with another plan. And he will. If he really loves me, he will.”

I stare at Sudha’s face, the spots of feverish color high on her cheeks, the faraway, unfocused look in her eyes. What does it remind me of?

And then I know. During those fairy tales we acted out as children, when Sudha was always the captured princess I had to rescue, she’d have the same tranced look on her face. In the course of rescuing her I’d run into trouble—that was part of the game—my royal horse tripping as I climbed hills formed out of human skulls, or a sea serpent grabbing me in its coils—but she never attempted to help me. Instead she’d sit on the bed with
clasped hands and a concerned expression on her face while I writhed around on the floor, grappling with the monsters she’d imagined. Once, exasperated because it wasn’t much fun playing this way, I asked her why.

She looked at me in surprise. “But it’s
your
job to overcome obstacles and prove yourself,” she said. “That’s what princes are supposed to do. If I helped you it wouldn’t be the same.”

I’m not sure when Sudha started getting caught in the enchanted web of the stories she loved so much and told so well. When, in some place deep inside her impervious to logic, she turned Ashok into the prince who has to save her from the clutches of the wicked king. Once he managed to place her on his milk-white steed, she’d follow him faithfully to the ends of the earth. But until then the rules of the story didn’t permit her—and, by extension, me—to help him.

“Please, Sudha,” I try one more time. “This is your life, not some stupid fairy tale in a book. Things never happen the way those stories say they do. And even if they did, I’m sure the princesses didn’t just sit and—”

“Promise me you won’t interfere, that you won’t say anything about Ashok to Gouri Ma,” Sudha says. Did she hear even a word of what I just said? In the milky moonlight her face has taken on a phosphorescent, fanatical glow. “Promise!” Her eyes bore into me until I mutter a grudging okay.

“Thank you, Anju!” she cries, throwing exuberant arms around me. “I knew you’d understand. Now we’d better get to bed. If Mother sees dark circles under our eyes tomorrow, we won’t hear the end of it for weeks.”

But I remain standing at the window long after Sudha’s gone. The night air, foggy now, wraps itself around me like a damp, mildewed shroud. I can’t see. I can’t breathe. I’m afraid Sudha’s making a terrible mistake, and I, whose job it is to stop her, don’t know how.

I AM DESPERATE
.

A proposal has come in for me, one which all the mothers agree is a wonderful one. It is from a family in Bardhaman, a town which is not too small and not too far away. The Sanyal family—that’s their name—is distinguished and wealthy, but not too much so. The groom, Ramesh, is also fatherless. At Mr. Sanyal’s death, greedy relatives had tried to swindle Ramesh’s mother out of the family business. “But she was too smart for them,” Pishi says. “She foiled their wicked plans and ran it most successfully—just like your Aunt Gouri—and made sure her three sons lacked for nothing.”

She was charming too, on the phone. And frank. “I’ll tell you right away, in spite of his name, my son’s no god of beauty,” she had said to Gouri Ma with a laugh. “That’s why I’m looking for a beautiful bride. My motives are quite selfish, I’ll admit: I want good-looking grandsons!”

The son who is no god of beauty has a high-ranking job with Indian Railways that requires a great deal of traveling on his part. I am not to worry, says my prospective mother-in-law. I will not have to go to all those godforsaken places where new rail lines are being laid down. I am to stay home with her and be the daughter she never had. She is looking forward to turning the household over to my care and spending her time with her prayer beads. And oh yes, dowry is of no concern—what with the son’s salary,
and the profits from the recent sale of the business, they have more than enough.

“Imagine that, no dowry demands!” says my mother, impressed. “Of course
we’ll
still give Sudha a magnificent trousseau. We don’t want people to say later that the Chatterjees were tight-fisted at their daughter’s wedding.”