The Vine of Desire (45 page)

The river is gray with age and weight. It has traveled a long way from the ice crag where it appeared out of a cave shaped like a cow’s mouth to this city populated by too many people, all their histories and hopes. Their deaths. For that’s what they bring to the river here, by the Kali temple. Flowers and food offered to the spirits of ancestors who hover, it is believed, on its banks until sent on with prayers. Bones and ashes and lamps to be set afloat in boats made of leaves. Elsewhere, the river is not so deified. Children pee into it, farmers bring their buffaloes for a
bath, jackals drink from it at night, in the morning teenage boys kick up mud and ogle the girls bathing in the women’s ghats.

“Take, take,” the priest says to Sunil. “Put on your head, your shoulders. Put more water, put properly. Ask Mother Ganga to take your sins away.”

Ankle-deep in sluggish mud, the two men are standing on the steps leading down from the temple area to the river. Sunil has reluctantly agreed to this ceremony to propitiate the dead, mostly to please his mother. Reluctantly, he has dressed himself in the coarse cotton dhoti which mourning sons traditionally wear and left his shoes in the car. (“Would you like to shave your head?” the priest asked earlier. “You must be kidding,” Sunil said.) Now he dips a finicky finger into the liquid, which does not look too clean. The priest, who has known Sunil’s family for years, shakes his head and sighs.

“Ah, you modern boys returned from America! But what to say, our boys here are no better, always talking germs and what not. There’s more in this world than what you see with your physical eyes.” His own eyes, magnified by thick glasses, glint as he speaks. “Don’t you know the story? When Mother Ganga, river of heaven, was asked by Lord Vishnu to come to earth to save us, she wept and said, Lord, don’t ask me for this, earth people will put all their dirt in me, physical things and their disgusting sins also. And the Lord said, See, I bless you with my touch, nothing can make you dirty. Never mind what-all they do, you will be most holy always.”

Sunil looks unconvinced, but he chooses not to argue. He was tired even before he started from America, and the long journey has made things worse. He’s still getting those headaches, is still nauseous from time to time, though his anxious mother has fixed for him, each day, the green plantain soup that
they give children to settle their stomachs. He hasn’t been sleeping well, either. The house is still full of guests, and so, despite his protests, he’s been put in his father’s bedroom, though thankfully not on his bed. (The mattress was burned along with the corpse, and there hasn’t been time to get a new mattress.) He startles awake each night, roused by a shriek. Tram brakes? A night owl? But surely there are no owls left in Calcutta.

Sunil has been disoriented ever since he landed at the airport. There was a Bangla Bandh that day, processions of yelling men who shook militant placards, while policemen waited on the pavements, armed with truncheons and tear gas. Sunil, who had not been back to India since his wedding, tried vainly to read the Bengali on the placards, the uneven sticky red of letters that looked as though they had been written in a hurry, with blood. Finally, he had to ask his mother what they said. She explained that it was a march by street hawkers to protest the new law that no longer allowed them to sell their wares on pavements in Calcutta. Street hawkers? Sunil repeated, his brow wrinkled as though it were a word he had never heard before.

Many of the major streets were closed because of the bandh and the private car his mother had cajoled from a relative had to go around and around, through narrow alleys Sunil did not recall ever seeing, trying to find a way home. (“Why did you get a private car?” Sunil had asked. “Because taxis stay off the streets when there’s a bandh. The crowd could beat up the driver and burn the car,” his mother said tiredly. “Don’t you remember anything, baba?”)

Now Sunil sits by the river, where the priest has lit a small fire, and repeats mantras to bring peace to the dead. But what about peace for the living? What about the woman and the child, the lack of whom he carries like a laceration in his flesh?
The priest pours black sesame seeds in his palm, sprinkles them with river water. (“Offer, offer. Pray.”) Sunil chants obediently after the priest—now they are holding up balls of cooked rice for fourteen generations of ancestors—but really he’s looking at the river. The sun has come out, and the slow-flowing water shines like steel. It hypnotizes him. In his father’s bureau there was a shoebox filled with uncashed money orders from America, years’ worth of them. Enough to keep his mother in luxury for the rest of her life. The waves sound like a dim confusion of voices. The voices of the dead, one might think, if one didn’t know better.

The priest is chanting: “Weapons cleave It not, fire burns It not. Water wets It not, wind burns It not.”

Sunil repeats: “Water wets It not, wind burns It not.” There’s perplexity in his voice, a certain unease. He wants to dismiss the sacred verse, handed down from a time so ancient and calm that it cannot possibly have a bearing on his tortured twentieth-century life. Why then does it make him reconsider his desires, which he thought he knew so intimately?

It is time to pour the ashes into the water. He holds out the copper pot. The ash is gritty, with black lumps which might be gristle. It is studded with pieces of bone, shockingly white. An old, charred smell rises from the pot. He sways a little, as though dizzy or intoxicated.

The priest chants, “This Self is unmanifest, unthinkable, unchangeable.”

“Unchangeable,” Sunil says. The waves take the word from his mouth and carry it toward the sea.

“Knowing This to be such, you should not grieve.”

“I should not grieve,” Sunil says. He is speaking not of his father, whom he has not so much forgiven as let drop from his
mind, but of himself, the addiction that he has carried on his back so eagerly all these years. Is it possible to let go of something that has cut such a deep groove into you? Ash falls from his hands. Some of it blows into his eyes and makes them water. He wipes at them. The priest nods with approval at this sign of filial piety. The gray flecks float for a moment on the gray skin of the river, then are pulled under.

Thirteen

S
udha

“Ridiculous!” Lalit says, kicking at a stone. “It’s a ridiculous plan. Going back to India, to some godforsaken tea town in the boonies, to waste the rest of your life taking care of some old man that you hardly know. How can you even consider it?”

We’re walking in the Botanical Gardens, up on the foothills behind the University of California. We’re in the desert section, surrounded by towering cacti with thorns like witches’ needles. Beyond, the acacias have burst into bloom, clustering gold coins on every branch. Is it because I’m to leave it soon that this California day looks so magical?

I smile to mask my disappointment. “Thanks for the vote of support!”

“I
do
support you. That’s why I’m upset. Haven’t I been doing everything you wanted? Didn’t I negotiate with Anju on your behalf, convincing her with my superior use of logic? It was like pulling teeth with a pair of tweezers, in case I didn’t tell you.”

“You did. About twenty times.”

“Well, it
is
a striking use of simile. Then I brought you your childhood beau’s number—”

“I didn’t exactly ask for that—”

“To provide more than the customer demands, that’s my motto. And now I’ve brought you here to see him so he can offer you blandishments and seduce you with sweet nothings. Is that beyond the call of duty or what?”

“It is. I’m most appreciative.”

“I can think of better ways of showing your appreciation than running away.”

“I am
not
running away.” But even as I say it, I wonder if he’s right.

“There are so many opportunities here for you and Dayita”—Lalit’s voice is heated—“and you’re throwing them all away—stupidly, if I may say so.”

“You should meet my mother sometime. The two of you would get along like French fries and ketchup.”

He gives me a pleading look. “Don’t ruin your life, Sudha.”

Because I’m unsure, I snap at him. “What life, Lalit? What kind of life do I have here? I’m tired of this mantra that everyone chants, this cure for all ills. AmericaAmericaAmerica. For you, yes. America did help you make yourself into what you wanted. But I don’t have any professional skills—”

“All you have to do is to go to school—”

“I don’t have the money for it. And maybe not the patience either. My visa will run out in less than a month. I’m working illegally. Even the clothes I’m wearing aren’t mine.” I point to the skirt, red hibiscus on soft black cotton, Myra’s, which she had insisted I wear for this meeting. (“He’s come all the way from Calcutta just to see you! I can’t believe it! That is
so
romantic!”)

Lalit fingers the material of the sleeve. “That’s why you’re so high-strung this morning. It’s the vibrations, as our Myra would say!”

“Quit! She’s been really generous to me, and she has a good heart. I like her.”

“I do, too. I never make fun of people I don’t like.” Then his voice grows sober. “All the things you hate about your life here, I could change them, if you’ll just—”

I put my hand over his mouth. “Don’t say it, whatever it is. It’ll jinx things between us.”

He grabs my hand, kisses it, then holds it to his face. “What things? You won’t allow us to have anything.”

I love the feel of his cheekbone under my fingers. The slight rasp of a day’s growth of beard. He’ll never know how tempted I am to give in. To let him kiss all my objections away. But sooner or later, they’d come back. I tug my hand from his. “We do have something very special. Our friendship.”

“Please, sir, may I have some more?” he says in a high child’s voice.

I laugh. He took me to an oldies revival to see the movie last week. Then I say, “I can’t offer you any more. Everything else I have, I need it just to survive. Besides, I don’t want to repeat the same mistake with you—”

“Which is?”

“I always allowed myself to be dependent on someone else’s goodwill. I was the one who was always taking, the one who was taken care of.”

“What’s wrong with that? It would give me great pleasure to take care of you.”

I shake my head. “It makes it harder to say no—”

“Personally, I don’t see that as a problem. But if it’s equality you want, I can think up all sorts of ways for you to take care of me, starting right now!” He leers at me unconvincingly, making me laugh again.

“It’s a good thing you didn’t decide to go into acting,” I say.

Then I see him. Wearing a woolen Nehru jacket, on the bench next to the garden offices with his back to me. He is gazing at a bank of Niles lilies.

“Just when the conversation was getting interesting,” Lalit says. “Don’t tell me that’s him. Man, he’s ugly. Old, too. And just by looking at his back I can tell he has a mean streak as wide as the Grand Canyon. Why, he might even be a psychopath. Us doctors, we’re trained to detect these things, you know. Uh-uh, he’s definitely not the man for you.”

In spite of my nervousness, I can’t help smiling. “And you are?”

“Mais oui! Absolument!
Maybe I should hang around, in case you need rescuing?”

“I won’t need rescuing, thank you very much.”

“I’m crestfallen. I’ll be back in half an hour to pick you up.”

I stand still for a moment, reluctant to call Ashok’s name. So many memories are welling up in me, sorrows I thought I was done with. Ashok in the movie theater’s dark, his eyes like opals, asking my name. His white shirt blazing in the Calcutta sun as he waited for hours by the roadside to catch a glimpse of me being driven to school. The time we met in Kalighat temple, among the odors of crushed flowers, to make plans for our elopement. I should have gone with him. My first love. How
could I know that the way I loved him then—I’d never be able to love anyone else like that? Not even him when he came back into my life after my marriage broke apart. How fleeting youth is, the passion that withholds nothing.