Sister of My Heart (20 page)

Now I take out Ashok’s letter, though I do not need to. I know it by heart already.

Sudha—

Did you believe I was going to be magnanimous, like the lovers in the old myths? Did you expect me to forgive you and wish you happiness with your new husband? Well, you’re wrong. This is what I’m going to wish for you: that you too will be let down by the one you love most. You too will be rejected for another. Your heart too will feel as though someone ground his boot heel into it.

Ashok, do you think my heart does not already know what that feels like?

Slowly I tear the note into tiny pieces. I hold my cupped palms outside my window until the wind takes them away into the darkness, like flakes of sloughed-off skin from the Bidhata Purush’s feet.

I focus on the sky with all my strength. Sometimes the pain is
so deep, the only way to survive it is to keep one’s attention on something immense beyond human sorrow.

If there were a falling star now, I know what I would wish for. I would wish Ashok a new love, one that held no hurt in it. If there is such a thing.

CRAZY LOVE
has turned my life upside-down.

Now that I’ll be a married woman in a week, the mothers have grown indulgent. I’m allowed to write to Sunil—every day if I want. I’ve bought myself scented paper, a purple pen. How I would have scoffed at such things earlier! For the moment at least, I’ve traded in Virginia Woolf for Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
How do I love thee?
I copy out painstakingly, in my best handwriting, more love-struck than Sudha ever was. Or have I taken on, in some strange way, a part of her nature? I thumb through Tagore’s poems to find lines to express the swallow-swoop of my heart:
Aaji … mane haiteche sukh ati sahaj saral. Today I sense how simple happiness is
. Every day I run to the gate when the postman comes. Sunil isn’t much of a writer. But when the mail does bring me a letter in his square handwriting, it’s like iridescent bubbles are bursting inside my chest. Perhaps because I’ve told him how much I want to travel, he usually writes about the places he wants me to see: Lake Tahoe, King’s Canyon, Baja. I whisper the names to myself at night before I sleep. They fall from my tongue like mysterious, alien jewels.

Even in my delirious state, I’m worried about Sudha. She’s gay enough as she goes through the day’s whirl with the mothers, choosing gifts for her in-laws, looking at jewelry patterns, getting her palms painted with mehendi. But every once in a while her laughter sounds brittle and too loud. There’s something desperate in the way she pirouettes in front of a mirror as she tries on a
gold-worked shawl. And then I wish guiltily that I hadn’t listened to her. That I’d gone to my mother and explained about Ashok.

Once I tried to talk to her about it.

“Okay,” I said. “I understand why you didn’t want to risk everything by running away. But Ramesh isn’t the right husband for you. You don’t even like him—I can feel it.”

Sudha said nothing.

“Why don’t you wait a bit?” I begged her. “I’ll tell Mother to look for someone else for you. You don’t
have
to get married at the same time as me—”

Sudha cut me off fiercely. “I don’t care who I marry—they’re all the same to me. All I care about is not having to live in this house with all its memories once you’re gone.” As she swiveled away, she whispered something I didn’t quite understand: “How could I stand to remain here without you, Anju, when you’re my only reason for remaining here?”

Two days before the wedding, Mother calls us to her room. I know it’s something important because Pishi and Aunt N are there too, looking tense. No one speaks when we enter, and Pishi draws the curtains and locks the door behind us. The heavy wooden bar gives an ominous creak as it slides into place. My mother struggles to sit up in the bed. There’s a small bottle of nitroglycerine tablets on the side table—she must’ve overexerted herself and had chest pains again. I imagine the burning, like red-hot fingers gripping her lungs. My usually sensible mother—oh, why’s she so stubborn about not undergoing the surgery she obviously needs? I want to rub her back with some of the root-and-herb oil which seems to help with the pain, but I know she hates having anyone fuss over her.

“Girls,” she says. “There’s something I must show you.” She takes a worn-looking jewelry box from the side table. It must be another one of those ugly heirlooms from my grandmother’s
time—maybe a bulky armband or a fat, moon-shaped comb—which Mother’s been sending to the jeweler to be remade into something finer to suit our taste. Then she adds, “Perhaps you can help us decide what’s to be done with it.”

I’m amused that she’s even asking us because usually the mothers make all such decisions on their own. Do they think we’re wiser now, just because we’re getting married? Don’t they see that in my current love-struck state, I’m barely capable of rational thought? I look at Sudha to check if she’s got the joke, but she’s staring at the box, eyes flared and—yes, afraid.

When Mother opens the box, my eyes widen too. Because inside is the largest ruby I’ve ever seen. Even in this dim light the jewel shines redly, with an angry energy.

Sudha makes a small sound like a moan. She presses her knuckles against her mouth to cut it off.

“This is what your fathers left behind when they went off,” Mother says.

I feel dizzy, off-balance, like I’m being thrust back in time. Anguish stings the back of my throat like old sand. Anguish and rage. The rage which had made me punch the walls of my room because I had nothing to say when my schoolmates taunted me for not having a father. I hear myself saying, in a lost child’s voice, “How could he leave us like that?” How many times I’d asked Mother that, only to have her send me away without an answer. Today, finally, I know I can make her tell me if I want.

Then I realize something. I no longer want it. Even truth can come too late. My father’s motives mean nothing to me any more. I have Sunil now. My own man, more precious than any ruby, who’ll never abandon me.

Pishi and Aunt are watching Mother, who seems at a loss. It’s as if they’re waiting to hear what she’ll say. I wonder whether they each have a different story about what happened, and which of these—if any—is the true one. Is there ever a story that can capture the whole truth? I’ve a feeling that if I retell this one to
my children, it’ll have transformed itself by then into something quite new.

Except I’m not going to. I’ve no interest in passing on the tale of two overgrown boys who went off adventuring without a single thought about what would happen to the women they left behind. Who thought excitement would taste sweeter than all the pleasures of home. If storytelling is how we keep alive those who are gone, then I enthusiastically condemn my father and uncle to oblivion.

But Sudha speaks into the shadowed silence of the room. “They went because, like all men, they wanted to win something amazing, something everyone would admire them for.” Her eyes are opaque as stormy water, and her face has gone blank, like a room where someone switched off the light. “It’s all true, then,” she says, in a strangely despairing voice.

Mother looks as if she wants to ask Sudha what she means, but finally she just sighs and rubs at her chest. “It happened a long time ago. If it weren’t for the fact that we can’t decide what to do with the ruby, I wouldn’t even show it to you at this auspicious time.”

“That stone’s brought us nothing but bad luck ever since the day it appeared in this house,” Pishi bursts out. “I say we get rid of it. I’ve been saying that all these years, but neither of you would listen. We should sell it and use the money for wedding expenses—God knows we need—”

“Now, Didi,” Aunt N interrupts excitedly. “You know we’d never get a fair price for it. Those jewelers, as soon as they see us women, they’ll know they can cheat us blind. I say we keep the ruby. It’s just a stone. How can it bring bad luck?”

I hadn’t expected Aunt, with her amulets and soothsayers and weekly
pujas
to keep the planet Shani from casting his evil eye on us, to turn so pragmatic all of a sudden. She must want this ruby badly.

Mother, impartial as usual, says, “My idea is to have the ruby cut in two and made into pendants for each of you girls.”

“But that would ruin its beauty—and its value,” protests Aunt.

“What’s your solution then?” Mother sounds irritable. They’ve reached this impasse before, I can tell.

To my surprise Aunt lowers her eyes. Her cheeks redden like a bashful girl’s. For a moment I can see how beautiful she must have been before the shock of her husband’s death turned her into a grasping, scolding, fearful woman. She takes a deep breath and lets her words tumble out. “I think Sudha should have the ruby, seeing how Anju has so much more. Besides, it was her father who brought it to us in the first place—”

“That’s not fair, Nalini,” Pishi says sharply, “and you know it. Why, if any one of the girls is to have it, it should be Anju. Because if your husband hadn’t put all those wayward ideas into Bijoy’s head, he would still be here today.”

I’m taken aback by the naked animosity in Pishi’s voice. It’s true that throughout our childhood the mothers disagreed on how things should be done, and sometimes even argued hotly. But the next day they’d be the best of allies—if not friends, united against us. Sudha and I used to joke about how they were like the holy trinity, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, keeping our little domestic world on track. Had it been a facade all this time, carefully constructed to keep us from guessing how fragile the foundation of our household really was? Now that we were almost married and no longer needed to be sheltered, cracks were widening underfoot, the ground beginning to shift.

Sudha’s been staring at the stone as if there are invisible letters on its fiery surface that only she can read. Now she says, decisively, “Pishi’s right. I want Anju to have the ruby.”

“You brainless girl,” cries Aunt N. “You don’t know what you’re saying!” She turns to my mother in agitation. “Don’t listen to her, Gouri Di.”

Mother starts to say something, but I interrupt. From somewhere a thought has come to me, so lightning-sharp, so clearly not
mine
, that I know it’s the correct answer.

“The ruby must be put back in the vault.” I even sound different, my voice full as a temple gong. “It’s not really ours. None of us has a right to it. Not until—”

“Not until
what
?” asks Pishi. But I shake my head.

“She’s right,” says Mother, sounding startled. The other mothers nod as well. They all look relieved. Mother hands me the box and asks me to take it back to the bank tomorrow.

I feel very grown-up as I walk down the corridor alone. It’s a little scary. In my hands the box is lighter than I thought it would be. Sudha’s gone off to her room, saying she needs a nap. I’ll have to wait to tell her the part I held back from the words that had been sent—there’s no other way to say it—to me.
Not until we’ve suffered even further, not until the house of the Chatterjees is reduced to a heap of dusty rubble
.

As though it were only a matter of time.