Sister of My Heart (38 page)

With all its furniture gone, the living room is a cavernous emptiness, echoing under my steps. It takes a moment for my eyes to get accustomed to its shuttered dark. And then I see, on one of the two wicker moras that Ramur Ma must have set up hastily, a man is sitting. And even before I recognize his face, gaunter than before, and bearded, I know him by his white shirt.

The ground buckles up around my feet. I have to hold on to the wall.

“Sudha,” says Ashok, and his voice is the same as years ago, the brown-sugar voice that I kept strenuously from my dreams all through my marriage, all through the breaking up of it.

I wonder at the fact that the mothers have allowed him into the house. Is it because I no longer have a reputation left to lose?
Or could it be something else? But I cannot think straight. My heart beats erratically, as though I were still that naive girl in the cinema hall, balanced on the threshold of adulthood, my eyes dazzled by its neon magic. My foolish heart, as though the world has not taught me a hundred bitter lessons since then. It makes me infuriated with myself.

Perhaps that’s why my voice comes out harsher than I intended. “Why did you come here, Ashok? Is it to look down on me in my time of trouble, and say,
If only you’d listened to me
? Well, let me tell you, though this isn’t how I expected my life to turn out, I’ve no regrets for what has happened. None. And I’m not ready to give up either. I’m going to fight for my daughter and myself, and I’m going to win.”

Ashok is taken aback by my attack—I can see it in the hurt surprise in his eyes. “I’m not here to gloat. How could you think that?”

“I don’t want your pity either,” I say belligerently. That would be even worse, somehow—to see pity in the eyes that had once looked at me as though I were truly a princess out of a fairy tale.

“I’m not here to offer you my pity.” Now he’s smiling a little. The gentleness with which he speaks only makes me want to cry. And that would be worst of all, to burst into tears in front of Ashok. I turn to leave. I will keep my dignity, even if I have nothing else.

“Stop, please.” Now he’s off the mora, standing in front of me, his hands held up. But he doesn’t touch me, nor I him. This much, at least, the years have taught us. “Aren’t you even going to give me a chance to tell you why I came?”

I push past him.

“Sudha!” he calls from behind me, part laughing, part exasperated. “You’re as stubborn as ever!”

I almost stop. I want to tell him he is mistaken. Or maybe he never knew me. Just as I never really knew him. I am not stubborn.
I am quiet, forbearing, gullible and dutiful. That is why he is not the father of the baby I am carrying.

“I wanted to say this properly, not blurt it out to your back, but you give me no choice. Sudha, I want to marry you.”

An incredulous joy spurts up in me, but I will not give myself to it. It must be a mistake—of Ashok’s tongue, or my ears. And even if he did say what he said, he might regret it in a moment—or a week, or a year. And then how could I bear it?

“Why would you want to marry me?” I speak roughly, gesturing toward my ungainly belly, my bare forehead. “Why would anyone?”

“Am I just
anyone
?” Ashok says, but I notice that his eyes shift away from my stomach. “I’ve been asking myself the same thing ever since Singhji told me you’d come back home. Because I knew, that very minute, what I was going to do. And the answer is, I can’t imagine being happy with anyone else. After your wedding, my parents tried many times to get me to marry. They arranged gatherings where I’d run into attractive young women. They even persuaded me to attend a few bride-viewings. I was so angry with you, I almost agreed to get married, just to spite you, to show you I didn’t care. Thank God I came to my senses before I ruined another life along with my own.

“Instead, I threw myself into the family business. In my spare time I took up sports, went mountain climbing. Parachuting. The riskiest things I could think of. I hoped they’d keep my mind off you. Nothing worked. You were an obsession, a drug in my blood.

“I tortured myself further by meeting with Singhji and making him tell me everything he knew about your married life. I hated your husband, that monkey with a pearl necklace around his neck. I couldn’t stop picturing him with you—even though it made me feel like someone was squeezing my throat in both his hands—at small, intimate moments. Accepting a cup of tea from you, putting out his hand to tuck a stray strand of hair behind
your ear as though it was his right. When I heard your in-laws were pressuring you because you weren’t pregnant, I wanted you to have a baby and be happy. But not really. What I really wanted was your marriage to fail. I wanted you to have no one but me to love.” He shuts his eyes and presses his fingertips into his temples, and when he opens them, uncertainty blends with shame in his eyes. The beginnings of age lines bracket his mouth, and a muscle jumps nervously in his cheek. I see that he is no prince after all, though he has tried manfully to be one because I wanted it so. He is human, like me, racked by the same demons, the same treacherous need.

I walk into his arms then, and it is as though I have completed a movement I began long ago in the Kalighat temple, one of those complicated dance sequences which take you all the way across the stage before you can return to where you started. I touch his chest. In spite of its tumultuous rise and fall it seems a solid place, a place where one may build a shelter to last a lifetime.

We sit on the steps of Outram Ghat and watch the long tremble of the ferryboat’s lights moving across the darkening waters of the Ganga. It is evening. The street lamps cast warm yellow pools of glowing around us, the jhi-jhi bugs chirp sleepily. We talk a little, Ashok and I, but we are not uncomfortable with silence. It is enough to be with him. To touch his hand—its square knuckles, its slight rasp of hair—is to be filled with the presence of miracle. So much of what we might speak of is external anyway. Secondary. The events of our lives have marked us, yes, but they have not changed our essential selves, no more than an avalanche changes the rock-heart of the mountain slope over which it crashes.

When a distant clock chimes eight, we rise, Ashok helping me carefully to my feet. The mothers do not like me to stay out late,
although now that our wedding is merely a matter of time, they have no objection to us seeing each other.

Ashok maneuvers himself around my belly so he can embrace me. Inside me, I feel my daughter squirm. Suspicious of men—as she has ample cause to be—she has not been entirely happy with this recent development.
You’ll like him
, I tell her.
He’ll be a good father to you
. She maintains a mutinous silence. At opportune moments—such as this one—she kicks out hard.

“Oof!” says Ashok. “Not again! I’m beginning to think she doesn’t want me anywhere near you!”

I laugh. He joins in, but it is an edgy sound. On the way home, he does not touch me again.

Last week Ashok brought his parents to meet me. His father, in whom I see how Ashok will look in twenty years, did not speak much, but his smile was kind. His mother took my hands in hers and squeezed them tightly. In a voice soft as rain she told me how delighted she was to see Ashok marrying at last.

“He’s loved you for so long, my dear. Sometimes nowadays I wake up at night and he’s standing by the hall window. I ask him what the matter is and he tells me he’s too excited, there’s a hot, sparkly feeling in his chest, the night is so magical with its moonlit clouds, how can anyone just lie in bed.”

“Mother!” Ashok protested, laughing. “You’re giving all my secrets away. Now Sudha’s going to be impossible to live with.”

I love watching Ashok’s hands as he drives. The deft, minimal turns of his wrist. The way he rests two fingers lightly on the steering wheel as the car glides ahead, smooth as a swan. Sometimes he drives with only one hand and brings my hand to his lips
with the other. He kisses each separate finger, then the hollow of my palm.

Oh, Anju, how I wish you were here so I could tell you face to face how it feels. Whoever knew that when I scrubbed away what the Bidhata Purush had written on my forehead, I would uncover this? A rosy happiness has dyed my body through and through. Happiness beyond deserving. It frightens me.

“But will you be happy with me?” I ask Ashok. “I’m no longer that star-eyed girl you fell in love with. I don’t think I can trust anyone so completely ever again. I don’t know if I can love anyone except my daughter so completely.” A frown marks Ashok’s face as I say this, but I force myself to continue. “And my past—it’ll always be there, reminding you that my body was another man’s first. Will you be able to live with the fact that when I came to you I was no longer a virgin?”

“Did you love him?”

I consider the question. I have felt affection for Ramesh, and often pity. At times we have been comrades pitted against a stronger, more ruthless force. But love? No.

“Then I can live with it,” says Ashok. I want to believe the sureness in his voice. I
will
believe it.

Our kisses are long and starved and urgent, they are full and sharp as wild fennel. They are golden as butter in sunshine. We kiss with a strange urgency, as though we do not have a lifetime of kissing ahead. Is it because, being older, we know how grudgingly the world hands out its gifts, how eager it is to snatch them back?

Tonight when we have reached the apartment and I am about to get down from his car, Ashok catches my hand and holds it against his mouth. I feel little puffs of heat on my fingertips, his delicious breath. Then he says, “Do you truly believe in honesty between lovers?”

“Of course.”

“Then I must tell you something that has been tormenting me the last few days, and you must promise to consider my request.”

I nod nervously. The car is suddenly full of shadow, like the bottom of the sea on a stormy day. What can it be? Perhaps he wants a big wedding? Perhaps it’s something to do with his family? Whatever he wants, I cannot imagine denying it to him.

He looks out across the sea-shadows, hiding his emotions—as men do—behind his darkened, distant gaze.

“I’m no saint, you must remember, just an ordinary man with my own limitations.”