The Vine of Desire (3 page)

“So in my teenage years, I read things like
Anna Karenina
and
Sons and Lovers
and
The Great Gatsby
and
A Room of One’s Own.
I’m glad I did, but maybe Aunt Nalini—that’s Sudha’s mom—was right. They were no good for me. They filled me with a dissatisfaction with my own life, and a longing for distant places. I believed that, if I could only get out of Calcutta to one of those exotic countries I read about, it would transform me. But transformation isn’t so easy, is it?”

What about the other places of her growing-up years? The ones she never spoke of, the ones you’d have to eavesdrop among her dreams to find? Such as: the banquet hall where she saw her new husband stoop to pick up a woman’s handkerchief that was not hers? But the rest of that scene is brittle and brown and unreadable, like the edge of a paper held to a flame, another of those memories Anju keeps hostage in the darkest cells of her mind.

“The bookstore was where I met your father. He had come dressed in an old-fashioned kurta and gold-rimmed glasses—a kind of disguise so that I wouldn’t guess that he was the computer whiz from America with whom Gouri Ma was trying to arrange my marriage.

“He’d come to check me out! Can you imagine! People just didn’t do such things in Calcutta, at least not in traditional families like mine. When he confessed who he was, I was terribly impressed. But what made me fall in crazy love with him was that he bought a whole set of the novels of Virginia Woolf. She used to be my favorite author, you know. But he’d done it only to win me over.” She sighed. “Later I couldn’t get him to read even one of them!

“Still—he’s going to be a wonderful father to you. I’m sure of that. He’ll love you more than anyone else does—except of course me and your Sudha-aunty!”

This evening, her dinner uneaten, Anju pushes back her chair and walks over to the old, discolored mirror that hangs in the small bathroom in the passage. She runs an uncertain hand through her hair and touches the dark circles under her eyes. She presses down on her jagged cheekbones—she’s lost a lot of weight since the miscarriage—as though she could push them in and hide them. “God, I look like such a witch!” she groans.

Last week she opened her India suitcase and took out a framed picture of herself and Sudha at their school graduation dinner. She examined it for a long moment before setting it on her dresser with a dissatisfied thunk. Even at that heedlessly happy time in her life, she hadn’t been pretty in the traditional way. She didn’t have her cousin’s rush of curly hair, or those wide, sooty eyes which always looked a little mysterious, a little tragic. But anyone could see (anyone except herself, that is) that she had spirit. In the photo, she stares out, a challenge in her eyes. She crooks her lean, stubborn mouth in a half-smile. There’s an irrepressible intelligence to her nose. Maybe that
was what made Sunil choose her from among all the girls he could have had as an eminently eligible, foreign-returned, computer-whiz groom in Calcutta.

But somewhere along the way Anju’s eyes grew dull and muddy. Her mouth learned to twitch. And the expression on Sunil’s face when he watches her nowadays—he does this in bed, sometimes, after she has fallen asleep—is complicated. At times it is pity. At times, regret.

All through the fall of her pregnancy, while the leaves of the maple turned a crisper, brittler red until they were suddenly gone, Anju told Prem stories of Sudha. Beautiful Sudha, the dreamer, the best cook of them all, the magic-fingered girl who could embroider clothes fit for a queen. Luckless Sudha, who worked so hard at being the perfect wife to Ramesh even though she didn’t love him. Until the day she walked out of the marriage.

“It was because of her witch of a mother-in-law. For years she’d been harassing Sudha because she couldn’t get pregnant. You’d think she’d be delighted when she found out that Sudha was having a baby. But no. She had to have an ultrasound done, and when she discovered that her first grandchild was going to be a girl, she insisted that Sudha should have an abortion. So Sudha ran away—how else could she save her daughter—though she knew they’d make her life hell afterward.

“Oh, that old crocodile! How I wish I could have seen her when she woke up to find Sudha gone!”

For weeks afterward, Anju would describe that afternoon for Prem, over and over, in the hushed tone one saves for legends.

The entire household has fallen into a stunned sleep, even
the servants. The heavy front door, which is carved with fierce yakshas wielding swords, opens without a sound. Sudha slips out, carrying only a small handbag. She wears her cotton house sari and forces herself not to hurry so passersby will not be suspicious. The air inside her chest is viscous with fear. Her slippers slide on the gravelly road. Mango leaves hang dispiritedly in the heat, like small, tired hands. She walks carefully, she mustn’t fall, she presses her hand against a belly that will start to show in a few weeks. At the crossroads she pulls the end of her sari over her head in a veil, a princess disguised as a servant maid, so no one on the street will recognize her.

“What about Ramesh?” Sunil asked when Anju told him Sudha had gone back to her mother.

“What about him?” Anju said, her voice dangerously tight.

“Didn’t he try to bring her back?”

“Him! That spineless jellyfish! That mama’s boy!” Anju’s breath came in outraged puffs. “He did nothing—nothing he should have done, that is.”

There was a doubtful look on Sunil’s face. Was he wondering if there was more to Ramesh than Anju saw? If Ramesh wept for Sudha and the baby daughter he would never hold—carefully and quietly, in the shower, under cover of running water so no one would hear? At night, did his hand reach across the bed from old habit? And when he startled awake, was the taste in his mouth like iron? But Sunil knew better than to share such thoughts with Anju.

The following week, when he came back from work, she handed him an aerogram, triumphant with outrage. “Look!” It was from Aunt Nalini, informing them that Sudha had been served with divorce papers. The papers had Ramesh’s signature on them and accused Sudha of desertion.

What a dastardly trick!
Aunt Nalini wrote.
Now the poor girl won’t get a single paisa from them. They’ve even refused to return the dowry I gave her at the wedding—a dowry for which I scrimped and saved and deprived myself of pleasure my entire life, as I’m sure you remember.

“Is it really as bad as she makes it out to be?” Sunil asked.

And Anju, who would usually sigh and roll her eyes after reading one of Aunt Nalini’s missives (“Missiles,” she sometimes called them), snapped, “Of course it is. What makes you think otherwise?”

“Well, didn’t you yourself say that she was Drama Queen Number One?”

She ignored the comment. “If I could just get my hands on Ramesh! That jerk! You remember him at the wedding, his hair all glossed down with Brylcreem? He couldn’t take his eyes off Sudha. I remember thinking, He’s ugly, but at least he’ll be good to her. And now, just look!” She was pacing the room by now, panting a little.

“Please calm down,” Sunil said, his reasonable voice giving away nothing of what he might be feeling. “It’s not good for you to get so worked up at this time.”

“Isn’t that just like a man,” Anju said, kicking furiously at the doorjamb. “To stand up for other men, no matter what they’ve done.”

“When did I—”

“Never mind,” said Anju. She didn’t speak to him the rest of the evening. The next day she said, “I want to bring Sudha to America.”

The words crashed into him like waves. He thought they might pull him out to sea. “And where’s the money for that going to come from?” he said. Though money wasn’t what he
was worried about. But what he was worried about couldn’t be spoken.

They had their first fight that day. Others followed in the weeks after. Thunderclouds of colliding words. Sobs. A stiff silence. A door kicked shut.

She started working secretly at the university library. She put her earnings in the bank and hid the savings book between layers of her saris. Each night her spine ached, the pain like an electric current moving up and down it, stopping wherever it wanted. “As soon as I have a thousand dollars, I’ll send Sudha a ticket,” she whispered to Prem as she made herself a bed on the lumpy couch. Her smile carved the dark like a thin, defiant moon. “Men! It’s best not to count on them for anything important.”

She rubbed her stomach gently, forcing herself to relax. “Present company excepted, of course,” she added.

She didn’t know that he, too, would fail her. In the worst way of all.

Anju abandons the mirror to pace the tiny apartment. In old yellow socks, her feet make a padding, caged-animal sound on the linoleum. She ends up in the kitchen, where she takes several eggs from the refrigerator. She breaks them into a bowl and begins rummaging around for a fork. She is not a good housekeeper. In spite of the efforts she has been making to tidy up for Sudha, the kitchen counters are a shamble of dishes that haven’t been put away and propped-open books and spices still in their torn plastic packets. Finally she gives up and takes a dirty fork out of the dishwasher, holds it for a perfunctory moment under the tap, and begins to beat the eggs.

“Anju! What on earth are you doing?” Irritation ripples along Sunil’s voice like a sleeve of fire.

“I thought I’d bake something for Sudha,” she answers uncertainly. “Maybe a devil’s food cake—it’ll be something new for her….”

Sunil moves with an athlete’s grace, stepping lightly on the balls of his feet. How fast he is! Already he has reached her. There’s something frightening in the way he holds his hands, stiff and suppressed, close to his body. But she isn’t afraid. There’s a feverish exhilaration in her eyes.
I dare you.
But he merely pushes past her to swing the refrigerator open.

“Look!” The cords in his neck are tight with his need to shout, but he speaks softly. “Haven’t you done enough?”

She looks. The refrigerator is stuffed with dishes: spaghetti and meatballs, potato salad, tuna casserole, banana bread, vanilla pudding, apple pie. All the recipes she looked up painstakingly in her
Good Housekeeping
cookbook. It is the most Indian of ways, what the women of her family had done to show love through the years of her childhood, that simple time which she longs for more and more as her adult plans seem to collapse around her. There’s too much food, far more than Sudha can ever eat. Food that will spoil over the next week and have to be stuffed down the garbage disposal covertly, while Sunil is at work.

For a moment husband and wife glare at each other across the cold white spillage of refrigerator light, their faces too young, surely, to hold the tired rage stamped onto them. She grips the edge of the bowl as though she might fling it at him. Then, with a shaky laugh, she rubs her sticky knuckles across her eyes.

“I guess I did go a bit overboard,” she says.

“It’s only natural,” he says, his voice quickly, carefully kind. “After all, it’s the first time she’s visiting us, and you want it to be special.” There’s relief in the sag of his shoulders. The last months have been hard on him, too, not knowing when she might burst into racked weeping, or retreat to bed to wrap herself in one of her relentless silences. He puts an arm around her. “Come sleep now.” When she hesitates, he adds, “Don’t you want to be bright and fresh tomorrow, when your cousin gets here?” And she, a faraway look on her face, allows him to take the milky-yellow mess of eggs from her and lead her to their bedroom.