Sister of My Heart (8 page)

“Anju—” Sudha’s tone trembles on the edge of anguish. What terrible thing could have happened to shake her belief in
our relationship like this? The fear’s like a big boulder inside my chest now, leaving no room for breath, and though I’m usually determined to pursue a question to its bitter end, this once I prefer not to know.

But I do know what she needs to hear.

“I’d love you,” I say, “no matter who you were. I’d love you because you love me. I’d love you because no one else knows us as we know each other.”

“Would you really?” asks Sudha, her voice loosening with relief.

“I would,” I say. There’s a strange prickling—like a premonition?—along my backbone as I speak. Even to my own ears my voice sounds green and raw, too young to shore up the promise it’s making.

What nonsense! I’m getting as superstitious as Sudha.

I take a deep breath. “Because no matter what, I’m still the person who called you out into the world,” I say firmly.

Sudha leans her head on my shoulder and releases a sigh so deep I know it carries the full weight of her heart. “You are, Anju,” she says. She starts to say something else, then changes her mind and kisses my cheek instead. Her fingers brush my palm like the tip of a bird wing as she puts the earrings back in my hand. “You keep these for me. I’ll ask you for them whenever I want to wear them.”

And I know she will.

Walking down the stairs hand in hand, we discuss what to do with the money we’ve been given. It isn’t a lot, but it’s the first time we’ve had money that doesn’t have to be accounted for. It makes us feel rich and reckless.

“I’ll buy clothes with mine,” says Sudha dreamily. “Salwaar kameezes soft as a baby’s skin, colored like dawn. Saris made of the finest translucent silk, the kind that can be pulled through a ring. Scarves shimmering like a peacock’s throat. I’ll buy satins and stitch them into puff-sleeved sari-blouses with tiny mirrors embroidered in, and white lace nighties light as gossamer for
summer nights, all of it as different as possible from the drab, decorous dresses we’re forced to wear—”

I’m taken aback by the longing in her voice. Sudha’s always seemed so calm and accepting—I had no idea she hated our clothes—which are admittedly unexciting—so much. What other surprises might my cousin have in store for me?

“You’d never even be allowed to try on such things,” I say sadly. “You know how strict the mothers are about what a daughter of the Chatterjees should look like when she goes out in public.”

Sudha smiles. “I don’t care. I’ll wear them in my own room. I’ll wear them for you. But what’ll you buy?”

“Books! I’ll send away for books that are hard to find in this country. Books by writers the nuns mention disapprovingly. Kate Chopin. Sylvia Plath. Books where women do all kinds of crazy, brave, marvelous things. I want the latest novels, to give me a taste of London and New York and Amsterdam. I want books that’ll spirit me into the cafés and nightclubs of Paris, the plantations of Louisiana, the rain forests of the Amazon, and the Australian outback. All the places”—here my voice grows a little bitter—”I’ll never get to visit, because the mothers won’t let me.”

Sudha gives me a quick hug. “Oh, Anju, I’m sure you’ll see many of them! Maybe after marriage—”

“Sure! I’ll probably end up married to some stodgy old fellow who’ll never want to step out of Calcutta, someone whose idea of a good time would be to lie on a divan, chewing paan and listening to filmi songs. Someone who’ll—”

“Now who’s getting all worked up about imaginary things?” says Sudha, laughing. “Don’t worry, I’ll make a wish for you, that you’ll travel all the way across the world. But oh, I’ll miss you so much when you go.”

“I don’t believe in wishes,” I say grumpily. But inwardly I hope my cousin is right.

We spend the rest of the afternoon in Sudha’s room, examining her birthday bedspread. It’s an ambitious design that’ll take even someone as diligent as my cousin a good many months to embroider. There’s a large sunflower in the center, and a border of dancing peacocks intertwined with a saying in an old-fashioned script that takes us a while to decipher. Then we both burst out laughing, because the letters read
Pati Param Guru, the husband is the supreme lord
.

“Where on earth did Aunt N dig that up from?” I say, grimacing.

“Maybe she special-ordered it,” Sudha says, wiping her eyes.

“She must have said to the bedspread maker, I want something that will teach my wild and wicked daughter the proper womanly virtues,” I add, “and the bedspread maker must have said, Madam, by the time she’s finished embroidering the hundredth Param Guru, I gurarantee you she’ll be the perfect wife.”

We laugh again, our voices high and shaky, the way you laugh when you’ve been too close to the edge. We decide that if Sudha puts extra-long tails on the peacocks, it’ll cover up the writing and no one will know the difference. We seal our conspiracy with a kiss.

But that night, lying in a tangle of damp bedsheets in the hot dark, my heart still aches like someone ripped it in two and then stitched the torn edges roughly together with one of those thick needles the streetside muchis use to repair our sandals. I can’t stop wondering why Sudha had made that strange comment about not being who I thought she was. What could have possibly happened to shake her belief in herself? In us? And why, for the first time in our lives, had she chosen to keep something so important from me?

THE NEW MOVIE
had taken Calcutta by storm. Everywhere there were billboards, larger and brighter than life, depicting the hero and heroine. She in her exquisite gold-worked dancing skirt and dupatta, the innocent virgin in the midst of a corrupt court. Or weeping in the clutches of the evil nabab as her prince rushes on horseback to her rescue. At school the girls couldn’t stop whispering about how romantic it was, the lovers singing of eternal passion as they sail on a moonlit river. And then, just as they are to marry, his stern patrician father denouncing her because she is only a dancing girl. Her lovely eyes filling with tears as she decides to leave rather than ruin her beloved’s good name. Every paan shop in the city played the songs, “Chalo dildaar chalo, Come with me, heart of my heart, to the other side of the moon.” And “Saari raat chalte chalte, Traveling all night, miraculously, I have found you.” Every young woman’s heart beat faster as she listened, humming the words under her breath. Every young man’s heart must have beat faster too. But of that I was not sure. Thanks to the vigilance of the mothers, Anju and I did not know any young men.

We moved in a world of women, my cousin and I, at home and outside. It was a world of filtered, submarine light, languid movements, eyes looking out from behind a frieze. Small muted sounds: the tinkling of bangles, female laughter. In our house the few menservants did not come up beyond the ground floor. And
Singhji—although his deformity seemed to place him in a separate, androgynous zone—never entered the house at all.

At our all-girls convent school, no men were allowed past the darwan who guarded the gate, zealously twirling his metal-tipped lathi, making even the fathers wait on the street. At the few social occasions we attended, weddings or pujas, we sat among our women relatives, webbed around with gossip and song and old tales. Perhaps because we had no fathers, that other world—sweat and sunlight, male cologne, a man’s voice raised in a command to a passing servant—seemed distant and full of mystery, like the dim roar of an ocean seen through a telescope.

Our existence was restrictive, yes. But I found it curiously comforting too.

I knew most sixteen-year-old girls in Calcutta didn’t live like we did. I saw them on our way to school, pushing onto crowded buses, bargaining loudly with the roadside vegetable sellers as they shopped for their mothers, unabashedly fingering the lau and karala, pinching the sheem beans to check for freshness. Groups of teenagers gay as butterflies summoned the Qwality man and bought orange ices, giggling and wiping at their bright mouths when they were done. Women, young and old, hailed taxis and climbed in, on their way to New Market or Dalhausie; some maneuvered their scooters to work through streets packed with buses and pedestrians and stray cows, honking authoritatively. And once in a while in the dim alleyways where the flower sellers had their shops, I saw a girl holding hands with a young man, lowering her shy eyes as he pinned a garland to her hair.

And their clothes. Salwaar kameezes shot through with metallic thread, gauzy dupattas allowed to slide artfully off shoulders. The westernized ones in jeans, or narrow-cut skirts that showed off their rounded hips, their slender ankles. Their saris, when they did wear them, were in the latest filmi designs and not the traditional bordered handlooms the mothers bought for us. Their summer blouses, generously sleeveless and cut low in the back,
drew whistles from the streetside Romeos who leaned endlessly against the corner buildings, and made me blush.

How bold and fascinating these women were. How uncaring of that fragile glass flower, reputation, that lay at the heart of Anju’s life and mine. They were all that we, as daughters of the Chatterjees, yearned for and knew we could not be. Had our fathers been alive, the mothers might have been more lenient with us. But Gouri Ma’s promise to her dead husband seemed to have frozen our entire household, like the magic spell which, in Pishi’s stories, shrouded palaces in timeless sleep.

I accepted this, but Anju never stopped fighting. “Why must Ramur Ma go with us every time we leave the house, even to get books from the neighborhood library?” she’d ask. “Why can’t we go to Sushmita’s birthday party when all the other girls in class are going, instead of sending a gift with Singhji? No wonder everyone thinks we’re stuck up.” And “I’m tired of these old-women saris you make us wear. You’d think we were living in the Dark Ages instead of in the eighties. I bet there isn’t another girl my age in all of Calcutta—except poor Sudha, of course—who’s forced to dress like this. Why can’t I wear pants, or a maxi, or at least some kurtas once in a while?”

“Why, why, why,”
my mother would say. “Uff, my head hurts with all your questions. Why can’t you be quiet and let your elders, who know more of the world than you, make the important decisions?”

“We’d know as much about the world as you,” Anju would retort, “if you didn’t keep us penned in at home all the time like—like prize cows.”

“Did you hear that, Didi?” Mother would cry, turning to Gouri Ma. Loud with outrage, her voice made my ears hurt and my stomach muscles clench up. “Did you hear how your daughter talked back to me? Never in all my years did I hear a child in my parents’ home speak so rudely. Are you going to let her get away with this kind of behavior? No wonder my Sudha’s getting so stubborn nowadays. I can see where she’s learning it.”

Then everyone would be talking at once, Anju shouting, “Leave Sudha out of it, she never said a word, you’re always criticizing her for no reason.” And my mother: “See, Didi? See what I mean.” And Pishi, placating: “Don’t mind what the girl says, Nalini, you know how she is, born under the sign of the bull, never thinking what to speak and what not to speak before the words tumble from her mouth.” Until finally Gouri Ma would look up from the accounts book, which she brought home each evening, worry smudged like lampblack into the creases of her face.

“Please, quiet everyone. Quiet!”

And in the reluctant silence that followed she’d tell Anju, “The last promise I made to your father was that if anything happened to him I’d bring you up the way he wanted. The way a daughter of the Chatterjee family should be. You know that.”

Those words would have been enough to silence me. And her voice, somber and a little removed—the kind of voice I imagined the queens of Pishi’s tales to have.

Anju didn’t give up, though. “What’s more important, a living daughter’s happiness, or a promise you made to a dead man, who’s dead because he abandoned us to run after some stupid scheme?”

“Don’t talk about your father like that,” Pishi cried sharply. “You ungrateful, disrespectful child.”

“Or is it because I’m a daughter that my happiness doesn’t matter?” Anju’s breath came in gasps, and her voice wobbled as it always did just before she cried. “I bet if I were a boy you wouldn’t be saying no to me all the time like this.”