The Vine of Desire (2 page)

I will take no pleasure in any of this. Never again.

The lights of the hospital are stark and unseeing like the whites of rolled-up eyes. They singe her as she falls through the different stories, the different wards. Surgery, Radiology, Crisis Intervention. How many ways there are to die! She is breathless by the time she reaches the room where a woman lies splayed on an operating table. A frenzy of activity around her, men and women in masks swarming like white bees. Staccato orders being barked out. A limp brown hand, a thin wrist with the pale plastic tag that offers up to strangers the woman’s secrets.
Majumdar, Anju, 635-81-9900.
Why, it’s her, again! There are tubes. Needles. Dark and pale liquids pumped by blinking machines. The stench of spilled membranes, hopes tattered as newspapers abandoned in alleyways. The machines whir so loudly, she cannot hear what the white-coats are saying. When she looks closer, the pores on the skin of the woman’s face are enormous, black as burned-out craters. They widen like intractable mouths. She winces upward, but there is only a bumpy, spackled ceiling above her head, impenetrable. She feels herself turn thin and liquid, feels herself being sucked in.

She wakes in another room, inside the claustrophobic clutch of her flesh. A faint smell hangs around her, like rotten eggs. Pain slams into her once more, flattening her against the bed. Dazed and breathless, she is already forgetting where she has been, what she has been capable of. But the sense of emptiness.
She can’t forget that. When she can move again, she pulls the hospital pillow over her head with a choking sound.

There’s a ringing in her ears, someone chanting a toneless word. It takes her a moment to understand it.
Prem Prem Prem.
The name that was to have been the boy’s.

The man—yes, there’s a man at her bedside, suddenly, with imploring fingers,
him—
tugs at the pillow, but the woman is surprisingly strong. The tendons inside her elbows stand out like wires as she thrashes from side to side. The man is forced to call for a nurse. Two women come. One holds her down while the other shoots a chemical into her vein. They tell the man to go home. Get some rest. There’s nothing you can do for her right now, one adds. Her voice is detached but not unkind. Before she leaves, she turns down the light so the room is dim and green, the color of seawater.

Alone in the sea-green light, the woman feels her muscles begin to loosen in spite of herself. She is coming apart, the way a braid does when one has been swimming a long time. Soon her eyes will flicker with furious dreams under her closed lids. Her unruly eyebrows will angle into questions to which there are only uncertain answers.
Why? Why? Where?
With the last of her strength, she pushes her body to the edge of the mattress, cups it into a shape against which a child might rest. There, that’s good. With the last of her strength, she holds on to something she heard a long time ago, in another country, when she was not much more than a child herself: the dead are not irrevocably dead as long as one refuses to let them go.

One

The day Sudha stepped off the plane from India into Anju’s arms, leaving a ruined marriage behind, their lives changed forever. And not just Sudha’s and Anju’s. Sunil’s life changed, too. And baby Dayita’s. Like invisible sound waves that ripple out and out, the changes reached all the way to India, to Ashok waiting on his balcony for the wind to turn. To their mothers in the neat squareness of their flat, upsetting the balance of their household, causing the mango pickles to turn too sour and the guava tree in the backyard to grow extra-large pink guavas. The changes multiplied the way vines might in a magical tale, their tendrils reaching for people whose names Sudha and Anju did not even know yet.

Were the changes good or bad?

Can we use such simple, childish terms in asking this question? Neither of the cousins were simple women, though there was much that was childlike about them when they were together alone, or with Dayita. When Sunil was away.

Sunil. Anju’s husband. Sudha’s cousin-in-law. A young executive
with a bright future in a prestigious computer company. But no. None of this tells us who he really is. Because he wasn’t a simple man either.

It is not clear when Anju first sensed this. At their double wedding, when she stood beside Sunil, their bridal garments knotted, and watched him watch Sudha’s forehead being marked with the red powder of wifehood? Months back, when he told Anju that it was a bad idea to bring her cousin to America? The night before Sudha’s arrival, by which time it was too late? When did she first sense that though she loved him, she didn’t always trust him?

But lately Anju doesn’t trust the runaway roller coaster of her own emotions either. The wild mood swings after the miscarriage that would leave her weeping or laughing hysterically. The long bouts of depression, later, that immobilized her in bed, incapable of even answering the phone.

Guilt ate at her, a slow, pernicious rust. No matter how often Sunil assured her that the miscarriage could have been caused by any number of things, she didn’t believe him. When the blackness came upon her, her mind turned heavy and stubborn, like one of those cement mixing trucks you pass sometimes on the road. A sentence would catch in it and begin to rotate,
If only I’d listened to the doctor and not overworked myself
, until it broke down into a phrase,
If only I hadn’t, If only I hadn’t.
It ended, always, in the same anguished chant.
Prem Prem Prem.

She would rock her body from side to side, her neglected will-o’-the-wisp hair spreading its static on the sofa, fingers digging rigidly into her arms until they left bruises shaped like tiny petals.

“I don’t know how to help you when you’re like this,” Sunil would say.

Afterward, when the depression lifted, she would sometimes say, “You don’t need to do anything.”

Inside her head she added, Except love me.

Inside her head he replied, I do love you.

Inside her head she said, But not enough.

The night before Sudha arrives, Anju cannot sit still. Some of it is excitement, but mostly she is nervous. Why? Isn’t this her dear, dear cousin, sister of her heart? They’ve protected, advised, cajoled, bullied, and stood up for each other all their lives. Each has been madly jealous of the other at some point. Each has enraged the other, or made her weep. Each has been willing to give up her happiness for her cousin. In short: they’ve loved each other the way they’ve never loved anyone else. Why then does Sudha’s coming fill Anju with this unexpected dread?

If there are answers, she will not allow herself to think of them.

At dinner she is unable to eat. “But what if Sudha doesn’t like it here?” she keeps saying.

It is the year of dangerous movements. Two weeks back, a major earthquake hit Los Angeles, causing seven billion dollars’ damage and leaving more than ten thousand people homeless. Will Anju and Sunil read this as an omen? Or will they discount it in the belief that every year has its own disasters?

Anju, who is a terrible cook, has spent the day making lasagna because, she says, Sudha has never tasted any in India. The sink and their few dish towels are all dyed the same stunning orange, a color which looks fearfully permanent.

Sunil doesn’t comment on this. He focuses instead on the
gluey orange mass on his plate, at which he jabs half-heartedly from time to time. He is a meticulous man, a man who detests chaos. Who takes satisfaction each evening in shining his shoes with a clean rag and a tin of Esquire Boot Polish before putting them away on the closet shelf. But he makes an effort today and says nothing—both about the lasagna and about Anju’s question, which is not so much a question as a lament for something she fears has happened already. He is thinking of what she said a few weeks back, unthinkingly.
The happiest memories of my life are of growing up with Sudha.
He is thinking of what he didn’t say to her.

What about me, then? What about you and me?

“Let me tell you,” Anju was fond of saying in the last months of her pregnancy, “who I used to be before the accident of American happened to me.”

She would be lounging in bed with a cup of hot milk and honey and a novel, one of those rare days when she didn’t have to go to class. She would knock on the curve of her stomach. “You, sir,” she would say. “I hope you’re paying attention.”

She loved speaking to Prem. In an illogical way, it was more satisfying than speaking to Sunil, even though Sunil was a careful listener and made the right comments at the right times. But Prem—the way he grew still at the sound of her voice, the way he butted her ribs with his head if she paused too long in the middle of a story …

She told Prem about the old house, that white elephant of a mansion that had been in the Chatterjee family for generations: its crumbling marble façade, its peeling walls, the dark knots of
its corridors, the brick terrace where she and Sudha went secretly at night to watch for falling stars to wish on.

“It’s gone now. Demolished to make space for a high-rise apartment building. And I’m the one who kept at your grandmothers—do you know you have three grandmothers: my mom, Sudha’s mom, and Pishi, who’s my dad’s sister?—to sell it. I used to hate that house, how ancient it was, how it stood for everything ancient. I hated being cooped up in it and not allowed to go anywhere except school. But now I miss it! I think of my room with its cool, high ceilings, and my bedsheets, which always smelled clean, like neem leaves—and which I never had to wash myself!—and the hundred-year-old peepal trees that grew outside my windows. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t been in such a hurry to come to America. Sudha used to sneak into my room at night sometimes. We’d sit on the wide windowsill, telling each other stories. I’d tell her about characters in books I’d read that I liked, such as Jo in
Little Women—
and she’d tell me the folk tales she’d heard from Pishi about women who would turn into demonesses at night and the monkey who was actually a bewitched prince. She was great at doing voices! You’ll see it for yourself when she gets here.”

Some days, after the doctor had scolded her for not getting enough exercise, Anju went to the park. She would make a desultory round of the play area, watching the children, whispering to Prem that he’d be better than them all—more handsome, more active, and of course more intelligent. She would tell him how prettily the maples were changing color and then, choosing one to sit under, she would go back to her childhood.

“My favorite place of all was the family bookstore. For the
longest time all I wanted was to be allowed to run it when I grew up. Every weekend I’d beg Mother to take me there. I loved its smell of new paper and printing ink, its rows and rows of books all the way to the ceiling, its little ladders that the clerks would scramble up when a customer wanted something that was stored on a high shelf. There was a special corner with an armchair, just for me, so I could sit and read all I wanted. It was funny, Gouri Ma—that’s my mom—was strict about a lot of things, but she never stopped me from reading anything I wanted.