The Vine of Desire (4 page)

Ashok. He’s the one Anju never speaks of. Not to Sunil. Not even to Prem. The other man in Sudha’s life, her forbidden childhood sweetheart. Is Anju secretly jealous of him? Is that why her thoughts stray to him more often than she likes? She imagines him as a teenager still, tall and gangly in a starched white shirt, his chest caving in a little. Meanly, she exaggerates his buckteeth as he waits shyly on a Calcutta pavement for Sudha to pass by. How foolishly crazy Sudha had been about him—in private, of course, such things weren’t allowed in their family. Why, she’d almost eloped with him! Docile Sudha! But fortunately (that is the right word, isn’t it?), at the last moment, she came to her senses.

Anju remembers with painful clarity the night on which Sudha told her that she had decided not to run away with Ashok. Anju had been sitting alone on the windowsill in her bedroom thinking of Sunil, whom she had just met. The sky was very dark—perhaps there had been a power cut in the city—and the stars seemed closer than usual. She made an arch with
her hands and held it up to her eyes. She believed her life was going to be like what she saw: a safe and contained brilliance, a beauty that extended outward forever. When Sudha came up silently and put her hand on the back of her neck, she had jumped, startled. She had been that far away. Perhaps that was why she didn’t question her cousin more closely, though it had surprised her when Sudha said she was afraid to take such a big risk. What if things didn’t work out with Ashok? Sudha had said, looking away, her words falling from her all at once, like a bucket of water thrown out of a window. What would I do then? And Anju, intoxicated with her own thoughts, had said, quickly, You’re right. It’s better this way. Now, thinking of all that happened afterward, she wonders if she had said the wrong thing. She remembers Sudha’s fingertips on the base of her neck, trailing feverish entreaties she’d been too much in love to hear.

Last month, Ashok asked Sudha once again to marry him. In spite of the divorce, in spite of the baby. It was something unheard-of in families like theirs.

“I’m delighted for Sudha,” Anju said to Sunil when she got the news. Her face was pale and puffy, as though she’d been crying. “Truly, I am. I told her she should accept him. I told her that I’m better now, that I can manage here without her.”

Sunil—wise man—said nothing.

Then Sudha wrote back to say that she had turned Ashok down. That she was coming to America.

“I feel terribly guilty,” Anju told Sunil.

“You look pretty cheerful.”

She gave him a wounded look. “One can be guilty and happy at the same time. I can’t help thinking she gave him up because she feels she has to take care of me.”

“I don’t know why she needs to feel that way. Aren’t I here for you?”

“Silly!” she said, smiling. She gave him a hug—something she didn’t do too often since the miscarriage. “Of course you are! But Sudha—well, things between her and me are different.”

At night, before she falls asleep, Anju makes a wish: that Ashok will be intelligent enough to wait for Sudha until she returns to India. At the same time she wishes that Sudha will stay on with her in America forever. Does she realize that her wishes, clashing as they attempt to rise from our sublunary plane to the ears of the gods, cancel each other out?

The beautiful Sudha. But what have we really learned about her? Only the externals, the snow that cloaks a mountain in an illusion of sleep while an entire world of actions continues below. Small creatures moving through invisible burrows, larger ones crouched, waiting, in caves. The leap, the sinking in of teeth, the outcomes that sometimes astonish but more often merely sadden. And at the center, the earth itself, rock and mud and pressed seep of glacier. Who knows if it’s readying itself for another shift, one that will end, this time, in avalanche? Or in a scarlet eruption that turns the land to ash?

The subterranean truths of Sudha’s life are the ones we crave.

“Would you like me to comb your hair?” Sunil asks.

They are in their nightclothes, Anju sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the photograph. She seems not to have heard him, but she does not protest when he begins moving the comb through her hair with long, gentle strokes, nor when, after a little while, he lays it down to kiss her shoulders, then her throat,
and finally, tentatively—for since the miscarriage nine months ago she hasn’t been able to stand him touching her in that way—her lips.

But today she kisses him back—or at least she holds still while he kisses her, while his fingers unbutton her nightdress. Then she asks him to turn off the light.

“But why? It’s only the night lamp—you’ve always liked it.”

She shudders in the lamp’s deep blue shadow, pulling the bedsheet up to her neck. “I hate how my body looks. Everything slumps. The bones push out in all the wrong places—”

“Oh, Anju! You’re exaggerating,” he protests, but he gets out of bed to turn off the light. She watches his lean back crisscrossed with shadows, the simple arrogance of his muscles, bending. Her eyes find the photograph once again.

He kisses her eyes shut with determination. She opens her lips obediently under his. She wants them to succeed as much as he does, to be back where they were before—but where was that? She’s losing her thoughts in a rainbow fog, the start of a headache at the base of her skull. Still, when he says, “Remember that afternoon at the Rabindra Sarobar when I kissed you for the first time, how shy you were,” she says yes. Although in truth she can’t remember it. She tries hard to pull up a detail from the crumbly quicksand of her memory: Was it sunny? Was the sky filled with clouds like puffed rice? Were children floating paper boats on the lake? Was there a Lalmohan bird, crying from a branch above? He’s waiting for her to add something. (What?) She says, “The palash flowers had dropped their crimson petals all across the water,” then realizes guiltily that it couldn’t have been so, she had been married in winter, he would have left for America long before the first buds opened.

So she presses her face against his, and holds herself beneath
him the way he likes her to. But his weight on her is cold and enormous, a giant statue, made of concrete, except that it moves. His breath is like a furnace opening onto her face with its bitter coal smell. The ache at the base of her skull has grown into a voice, calling, even though calling is of no use.
Prem Prem Prem
, until she pushes him off and feels the failure, thick as slush, settle in his bones. She opens her mouth to tell him she’s sorry, she knows how hard he tried. She tried hard, too. But she just can’t. And remembering how it had been once was no good, it would never be that way again, even if they were able to stitch up this chasm of a wound that runs jagged between the length of their bodies now. But she must have said something quite different because he pulls back and looks at her, asking in an angry voice, “What do you mean, you’ve got to make it up to Sudha for what she’s sacrificing to come here to you?”

Anju doesn’t answer. He knows what she means, she knows that. But always, where Sudha is concerned, he likes to act obtuse, likes to force her to explain, to drag out the emotions inside of her, unclothed, so they look sentimental, or superstitious, or plain foolish. Well, this time she isn’t going to do it. She lies there mutinous, lips pressed together, thinking about Ashok. All those years he waited for Sudha when she was married to someone else. Was it out of love, or the fear of loving again?
I told him no
, Sudha had written. Anju twists a strand of hair around her finger distractedly until it snaps, wondering about that
no.
Could she have said it, in Sudha’s place? If she weighed a man’s devotion against a cousin’s need, the security he offered against uncertainty, which is all she has to give Sudha, which way would the scales tip? She needs to think it through, and she cannot do it here, with Sunil’s hand snaking from behind to cup her breast, his arm pulling her back against
a chest that smells of Claiborne Sport, a tangy scent she once loved that now makes her feel slightly sick. But of course she can never tell him that. Does such consideration rise from caring, or merely habit? This, too, she needs to think about.

She can feel him now, grown hard against her. A nuclear heat radiates from his bones.
Escape, escape.
She gathers up her nightdress in alarmed handfuls. From the sudden stillness of his body, his hands falling away, she knows she has offended him. He won’t try to stop her. He’s too proud for that. She slips silently from the bed—what good are words now, even if she could come up with the right ones?—and gropes her way next door, where she lies down in the bed she has prepared for the cousin who’s like a breathlessness inside her.

And her husband, does she love him? She turns the question, hard as a nugget of iron, around and around in her head. Ultimately she cannot imagine a life without him—and what else is that but love? She keeps her eyes averted from the crib Sunil has set up for Dayita. Ah, there’s another problem, the child whom she doesn’t want in her house. She’s afraid she might start loving her, and that would be a betrayal of the dead. How is she to manage it, to pretend that the child does not exist? How is she to keep Dayita at arm’s length without hurting Sudha? When she finally stumbles into sleep, her dreams are a chiaroscuro of uneasy strategies.

It is the year of accounting, the year of pardons, the year of uneasy alliances. Somewhere in America a man is sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of a black activist thirty years ago. Somewhere in India a bandit queen is released after eleven years in jail. Somewhere in Russia a cosmonaut is preparing to go into space, for the first time in the history of nations, on an American rocketship.

But here is Sunil, alone in his bedroom. Is he asleep, too? No. In the blue night-light he has turned back on, his eyes are chips of stone. They glitter with a strange resignation. Under the sheet, his hand moves as he stares at Anju’s graduation photograph. A rapid blur of movement until his body stiffens and arcs, then slumps down into itself, and he whispers a name into the pillow his wife has left empty. A moth-wing of a name.

Sudha.

It was her picture he’d been looking at, all this time.

But he whispered the name rather than calling it out in passion. Can we salvage a broken bit of hope from that? Out of consideration for Anju, he had whispered the name of the woman he’d been trying all this time to keep away. The woman he’d been mad for ever since he saw her in a garden tented with jasmine—too late, for by then he was already betrothed to her cousin.

But was it consideration, or was it fear? No, not fear. Not that. For there is one thing about Sunil that even Anju knows: he is not afraid of anyone—except perhaps himself.

Two

S
udha

We run barefoot on sand, impatient for water. Our hurry makes a small wind. It is the color of our saris, which stream behind us like the eager start of a fire. We are dressed in the same color—one of the many childhood habits Anju and I have fallen back into. Today we wear rebel red. It is a color that belongs to married women, one I have forfeited. I wear it with defiance.