Sister of My Heart (42 page)

I peer at her eyes—are they more red-rimmed than usual?—but she avoids my gaze and goes off for her bath.

When another week passes without a letter from Anju, I call. I call at our usual time, morning in India, evening in America. Anju is always back home by now, fixing dinner and grumbling about it. But this time no one picks up the phone, and though I leave her a message, she doesn’t call me back.

“That’s strange,” I tell the mothers after a couple of days have passed. “Surely Anju would call back—after all, I hardly ever phone her. She must have known it was important.”

“Maybe they’ve gone on vacation,” offers my mother.

But I’m not satisfied. I’m going to call again, I decide. When the mothers are not in the house.

The mothers have been unusually reluctant to leave me alone recently, so I have to wait until it is time for our weekly trip to the temple. We all get ready to go, and then I tell them I am too tired.

“Come on—it’s not far,” my mother insists. “It’s bad luck to say you’ll go to the temple and then change your mind.”

“We can take a taxi,” Gouri Ma says.

I yawn loudly. “I really think I need to take a nap.”

“Maybe I should stay with you,” Pishi says.

“No, no. Please go, all of you, and pray for Dayita and me. I’ll just be lying down anyway.”

By the time I convince them to leave, it is almost noon. Midnight in California. I am sorry I have to disturb Anju, but this way she will certainly be home.

Sunil is the one who picks up the phone, his voice sleepily bewildered and young. A voice I would not have recognized—it has been so long—if I had not known. I feel a moment’s awkwardness—the last time we spoke was on that ill-fated afternoon in the garden—but I push it away. I am calling because of Anju, I tell myself firmly. Besides, we are both adults now and have
been through enough of life’s hardships to know which things deserve our care, which are best left alone. When I tell him who I am, he pauses—is he too thinking of the jasmine arbor?—then says somewhat abruptly that Anju is sleeping. He doesn’t want to disturb her—she doesn’t sleep very well nowadays. “I’ll tell her you called,” he says, sounding as if he is about to hang up.

“Wait,” I call, “wait,” and then like a thunderclap an idea comes to me. It is worth a try—at least this way I will know if I have been worrying needlessly all this while, as the mothers claim. “Is Anju doing better now?”

I cross my fingers as I speak. Please God, let Sunil say, What on earth are you talking about?

Instead he says, in a startled voice, “So they’ve told you! I thought they weren’t going to until your delivery. No, she’s not better. In fact, she’s worse than she was right after she lost the baby.”

The words strike me like a fist in the center of my chest, knocking the air out of me. When I can breathe again, it is a wheezy, jerking sound, and I cover the mouthpiece so Sunil will not hear it. Oh, Anju, Anju! How did this happen? And I nowhere near you to help at this terrible time.

“I’ve only told Anju’s mother a little bit of this—I know she has a bad heart—but I’m going crazy keeping it all to myself,” says Sunil. “She won’t get out of bed. Actually, the sofa. That’s where she sleeps nowadays. She won’t take her antidepressants. I’ll set the tablets out by her plate when I leave for work, and when I come back they’ll still be sitting there. She’s lost a lot of weight—when I take her hand, it feels like a very old woman’s, with the skin sliding over the bones. She’ll only eat if I actually spoon the food into her mouth.”

The words pour through the phone and widen into a pool around me. Now they are rising past my ankles, my shins. “And she won’t talk. She hasn’t spoken a single word since I brought her home. She blames herself, I think. I tell her she mustn’t—
but my words have no effect on her. Once I tried to tell her how much I was suffering too”—here Sunil pauses, clears his throat—”I thought that would break the barrier between us—but she just covered her head with the pillow. That’s the same thing she does whenever I ask if she’d like to go visit her mother in India. The doctor wants to put her in a nursing home for a while, but when he told her about it during our last visit, her whole body started shaking, and her eyes went wild and skittery, like a trapped animal’s. I can’t bear the thought of sending her away. But I don’t know what else to do. I don’t have any more leave left and she isn’t getting any better.”

I find I am hugging my stomach tightly, as though Dayita too would slip away otherwise, like my beautiful, elusive Prem.

Not now, Sudha. Think only of Anju now
.

“Maybe you can help,” Sunil says. “Can you?”

I think desperately. The inside of my head is filled with a roaring sound like a distant fire, with whirries of dust raised by the Bidhata Purush’s furious passing. And then I know.

“Is she awake now?” I ask. “Then put the phone to her ear.”

He does it, and I start speaking. The inside of my mouth is caked with dust. Dust embroiders the lining of my lungs. It presses down upon me like an unkept promise, it sucks up my voice. But I make myself go on.

“Once there was a princess who spent her girlhood in a crumbling marble palace set around with guards. They told her what was proper and what was not, and held up their poison spears before her face if she attempted to stray outside the boundaries they had drawn for her. When she was old enough, she married, obediently, the king they had selected for her. The firecrackers at the wedding were so loud that no one could hear if her heart was breaking. And when she got to her husband’s house, she had no trouble adjusting, for it was exactly the same as the house she’d grown up in, except that the guards were fiercer, and their spear tips more poisonous.

“All went well with the marriage until the queen was due to give birth. Then a soothsayer discovered that the baby was a girl. Aghast at the idea that their future ruler might be a woman, the guards aimed their poison spears at the queen’s belly so they could destroy the baby before she could be born. The king, petrified with fear, could do nothing to protect her.”

I stumble over the painful words. This is not the story I had meant to tell Anju. But it has taken its own necessary shape, and I must follow where it leads.

“The queen was terrified too, but she placed her hands on her belly to gather courage from her unborn daughter. And she felt something being passed into her hands through the wall of the womb. Looking down, she saw it was a sword, a flaming sword made of light, and then another, one for each hand. Whirling the swords around her head like the Goddess Durga, like the Rani of Jhansi, the queen left the palace, and none dared prevent her.

“Along the way the queen met many people, but though they loved her and her newborn daughter, they were frightened by the thought of the guards who might be pursuing them. Still others were made uneasy by the unearthly brightness that emanated from them both by this time, for suffering and courage calls forth that brightness in us. Thus none dared to give them shelter.

“The queen kept searching for a new home. Some days her heart was low and she wondered if her daughter and she were doomed to travel the earth ceaselessly, but she never gave up. Until the day she reached the ocean’s edge and there was no place further for her to go.”

I come to a halt. The words I’ve been following through the labyrinth of memory like Theseus followed his ball of string have run out. What shall I do now?

Then, very softly, I hear Anju’s voice. “But suddenly the queen heard someone say, ‘Don’t worry, dear one. Reach for my hand.’ And looking up she saw a rainbow that extended all the way from the other side of the earth to her. You see, in all this
turmoil, the queen had forgotten that she had a twin sister who lived in the land across the ocean. The sister was sending her all her love in the form of this rainbow—”

Anju’s voice falters, but I take up the story. “The queen held her daughter with one hand and with the other she grasped the rainbow. And her sister pulled her across the ocean, over the gaping jaws of sea monsters, to safety.”

Anju is crying now. “Oh, Sudha,” she says between sobs, “I need you. I need you so much. I’m starved for you. I was trying so hard to get the money together for your ticket, but I messed everything up.”

Oh God! Was that why Anju had the miscarriage? She was working for me, unfortunate me. What have I ever brought her except ill luck?

“Please come,” Anju says. “Promise me you’ll come at once.”

I am shaken by how feeble she sounds, how pitiable. It is how I would have sounded, once upon a time, before I learned that mothers cannot afford fear.

I try to keep my voice even. “I’ll come as soon as I can, once Dayita is born. Now listen to me—meanwhile you must do everything the doctor says so you can get better. How else will you help me take care of Dayita? After all, she’s your daughter as much as mine.”

Anju laughs a shaky, rusty laugh. “Sudha, I can’t wait to see you! What fun the two of us will have.”

“The three of us,” I say.

“I can’t believe you’ll be here, Sudha, just like old times!” Anju says in a high clear child’s voice, as though she hadn’t heard a word of what I said about Dayita.

After the mothers return and hear everything, we hold each other and cry. Then we scold each other. “How could you keep something so crucial from me?” I say. “You told us you couldn’t come
to the temple because you were tired!” they retort. We shake our heads over the fact that Anju refuses to come to India, which would have been so much easier. “Stubborn as ever,” says my mother, but Pishi says, “Anju never could stand to be pitied,” and Gouri Ma says, “She’s thinking about Sudha’s life, about getting her a new start.” I tell them how Anju would not respond when I mentioned Dayita’s name. They say I must be patient with her loss. When I tell them why she was working so hard before the miscarriage, they are silent. Then Gouri Ma takes my hands in hers and says it was a great pity, but I must not feel responsible.

Oh, Gouri Ma—as though guilt were as easy to shake off as water on a lotus leaf.

The mothers marvel at Sunil’s generosity—he came on the phone after Anju and I had finished talking to say that he would arrange tickets and visas for Dayita and myself. But something puzzles me. Just before hanging up, he had given a sigh like someone who had been hanging on to a cliff ledge for a long time, someone who finally loosened his hands and felt with a strange relief the air rushing up around his body as he fell. “I tried,” he said.

I didn’t tell the mothers about that. He had said it very softly, to himself, and I might have heard wrong.

“But what did you say to Anju to get her to listen?” the mothers ask finally. “To talk to you?”

“Oh, just something,” I say, unexpectedly reluctant to discuss it. “Something private between her and me.”

“Can’t you tell us even a little bit?” pleads my mother.

“I told her a story.”

“Ah, a story,” nods Pishi. More than any of us, she knows the power stories hold at their center, like a mango holds its seed. It is a power that dissipates with questioning, so she merely asks, with an odd, wistful look, “Was it a story I’d told you, Sudha?”

I am sorry to disappoint her. “It’s a new story. One I made up, kind of, on the spot.”

“Does it have a name?” asks Gouri Ma.

I start to shake my head. Then it comes to me.

“The Queen of Swords,” I say.