The Vine of Desire (7 page)

The sun teeters over the ocean like an overripe orange, ready to burst. The road we’ve taken this time curves by the rippled dunes. It seems like the edge of the world. There are long rushes, like old women’s hair. But I gaze upward, always more interested in the things of the sky. Above me, bright particles, hovering. They look like kites flown by giants. I clutch Anju’s arm and point.

Huge and wheeling over the bay. Every possible color. But where are the cords? It takes me a moment to see the people dangling from them.

“They must be hang gliders!” Anju leans out of the window in her excitement, shielding her eyes. “I read something about them in
California Living—
they like to take off from the cliffs around here because of the strong offshore winds.”

One of the gliders is arcing back toward land. I admire the ambidextrous dip and lift of his wing spans. Their wide abandonment. Like being in love. I haven’t felt this way in a long time.

I grip the seat and speak to the back of his head, forgetting to be careful. “Can we please see where they land? Can you find it?” My voice vibrates like a tuning fork. Even Anju stares, surprised. He swivels his head for a long, risky glance at me, takes the next exit. I shouldn’t have asked. I shouldn’t have. In the driver’s mirror, a small pulse beats in his temple.

I am afraid of that erratic beating. But I will wait until later to be sorry. Right now there’s a spirit wind, wild and snatching. I open my fisted hands to it, feel it fly across my palms, rearranging lines. Sunil has wrapped Dayita in his coat. We walk across the parking lot—just a dirt strip on a cliffside. A platform of sorts where one can stand. Then the gliders are all around our heads, coming in to evening. Enormous winged creatures, helmeted and goggled, something other than human. But delicate and fervent, too. Are such things possible? To be so free of gravity, so deliciously loosened from earth?

“I’d like to be up there,” Anju says. She bends so far over the railing that I grow afraid and grasp her sari. There are purple shadows around her, aureoles of yearning. “It must be special, to feel the wind going right through you. All your problems slipping away—only you and the sky and the waves so far below they look painted. To maybe keep going into the light …” She leaves the sentence unfinished, languid with possibility.

Sunil puts out his free hand. His fingers are lean and polished as the copper the jewelers back home beat into bracelets. They encircle her elbow entirely, she’s lost so much weight. “Now you’ve seen them, let’s go home.”

“Wait,” said Anju, pointing. Two of the gliders are landing next to the platform. The men’s legs bracing against the ground, puffs of dust, gravelly scrape of shoes. The current from their wings pulls at my hair. Someone rushes up to unharness them, but they’re shrugging off their gear already, laughing, raising their arms high to clap hands with each other, pulling off helmets to let their hair—black, agile red—tumble out over their shoulders.

“Why, they’re women,” I cry. “Kingfisher women!”

Sunil and Anju look at me. “Kingfisher women?” asks Anju, raising her eyebrows at the bright yellow of their outfits.

I nod.

Once long ago, I’d seen them. Near a gorge. We were standing on a bridge. It was early morning, filigreed with fog. The birds were blue-backed and shining. Slim-beaked. They came out of nowhere, plunging down, soaring up, chasing each other, diving to the river for food. It seemed to me they sang. And kissed in the air. They weren’t afraid of anything. Even when the train thundered by, they kept doing what they loved.

“Is this real, or is it a tale like the ones you used to make up when we were girls?” Anju asks. “Because I don’t remember any such bridge—or any such birds.”

I realize that I’ve been speaking aloud. I hadn’t meant to. “You weren’t there,” I say reluctantly.

I don’t want to say any more. But they’re waiting.

“I was with Ramesh,” I say. It is the first time I’ve spoken his name since I came to America. Heat stings my cheeks. I wait for my voice to tell me how I feel. Is it sticky with bitterness? Black with tar? No, it is cool, matter-of-fact. It tells me nothing. “It was the only time we’d gone somewhere without my mother-in-law. He’d taken me to the inauguration of a bridge he’d built. He
was good at things like that. The workmen loved him because he was kind and fair and gave them all bonuses.”

This part I don’t say: He had stood close and put his arm around me. He asked if I were cold, would I like him to get the shawl out of the boot of the car. The birds had been flashes of blue fire. I asked him if they were kingfishers, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe they were creatures from another world. I told him I longed to be like them, bright and brave. He said, We can be like them, Sudha. We can. Why not? He believed it—I saw it on his flushed, earnest mouth. I almost loved him then. But later, when his mother decided to erase our daughter from my womb as though she were a misspelled word, he didn’t have the strength.

Sunil spits out an unfamiliar American invective and swings away—as though he can read my thoughts. His shoulders are high and stiff. He pulls the collar of his coat over Dayita’s head, hiding her from my past.

“Forget him!” says Anju. Her hand fits tightly over mine, that old protective gesture from our childhood days. “You did the right thing. That’s all that matters. A lot of women in your position would have given in. You left. You didn’t care that you had to give up everything….”

She doesn’t know the one hundred and one faces of my cowardice. My resentment. Someday I will tell her, I did care. All the things I had to leave behind, not only clothes and jewelry but my good name. The legitimacy of wifehood that I had worked so hard to earn. But now the women fliers are walking by us. They call out cheery hellos. They are not young, I note, surprised. There’s a grainy strength about them, like desert rock. Their skin is wind-rasped and bright with living. Their waists are wide and sturdy.

“What lovely saris,” the redheaded one calls out.

Unexpectedly, Anju holds out her hand. It trembles a little—such overtures are hard for her nowadays—the fingers curling inward in their reluctance. Her nails are soft as wax, and very white. I see with dismay that her lifeline has acquired a new, feathery thinness. The woman takes Anju’s hand in both of hers.

“You were beautiful,” Anju says.

The woman smiles. There is henna in her hair, I can smell its wild, weedy fragrance. “Thank you. Would you like to try it sometimes? It’s not as hard as it looks—I teach people. If you want, I can give you a lesson. We can go up together, on a tandem glider—”

“We really must go now,” says Sunil. He looks at the woman with disapproval. He is suspicious of unrequired adventures. They are American in the worst possible way. Unwomanly. He gives Anju’s elbow a small, proprietary tug. “Dayita’s bound to catch a cold in all this wind.”

“Do you have a card?” asks Anju. The woman nods and unzips a pocket, hands Anju a rainbow-colored rectangle. Her companion has joined us and drapes a casual hand around her waist. Weeks later, just before I fall asleep, it will strike me with a slight sense of shock that they are lovers.

As we walk to the car, I can feel their eyes on us, considering. Are they wondering about our little ménage, who belongs to whom? Perhaps they think all Indians live this way, the man walking in front, hunched and shivering against the wind. The child staring gravely over his shoulder. The two women stumbling a little in their wind-whipped saris.

No one speaks on the way home. Rain clouds glower through the rear window. We are tired and cranky. We’ve seen
the amazing, the primeval human dream made real: people with wings. And it hasn’t changed our lives.

Once in India I scrubbed the color of marriage from my forehead, believing I was rid of it. But it comes back. Some mornings, my pillow seems faintly powdered with red. In my lap Dayita is making puckered, sucking sounds, dreaming of milk. I try to think of objects—that’s the safest. A slice of Langra mango, flame-sweet. A cool shower after a sticky Calcutta day, the separate, silver threads of water flicking my grateful skin. Currents of air which travel the earth, circling, rising, somersaulting back. Holding up cobalt wings against a cobalt sky.

Three

S
unil

Come here, kid. Let me put my arms around you and my face against your chest. Delicate bird bones, your laughter like feathers. All day I’ve been waiting for this.

I can hear your heart going like a runaway engine. When Anju was pregnant, I once asked the doctor, why do kids’ hearts do that? He gave me a very scientific answer, but I’ve forgotten it.

So I’m just going to believe it’s because you’re happy to see me.

Sit on my lap so I can see your eyes, so much like your mother’s.

Forget I said that.

Sometimes I feel I’m drowning—but not while I hold you.

They say infants’ eyes look so wise because they still remember things from their past lives. If you could speak, I’d ask you what you remember. I’d ask you, Is it true, what they say about destiny being inescapable?

If you said yes, it would give me permission.

Kid, I’m so tired—and my struggle has just started.

Enough of my troubles. It’s time for a story.

Imagine pigeons—flocks and flocks of them, turning the screen white—yes, this is another movie I’m telling you about. I love movies, don’t you? So flat and rectangular, life simplified and contained, or at least made bearable.

Imagine an angry man whose trained pigeon is taken by another. Imagine a quarrel, insults, old incidents brought up, honor needing to be avenged. Does this sound like a different time? A different country? Or are you thinking that here, too, people are the same?

As I was saying, it was necessary to take revenge. So one of the men stole the other’s daughter and took her to a city far away to sell. They locked her in a dark room. There was another girl there, also kidnapped. The two wept together. Having lost their families, they thought of each other as sisters.

Are you wondering why I’m telling you a story about two sisters?

I’m not sure myself.

Perhaps as I tell it, I’ll figure it out.

The imprisoned girls—they were maybe twelve years of age—were quite docile. They ate what the woman in charge gave them. They went with her when she called. This made your Anju Aunty angry. She wanted them to slap away the hand that brought them food. She wanted them to bite and scratch. I said, But how could they? All their life they’d been trained to obey without question. Plus, they knew they’d be beaten if they fought back. Anju’s chest rose and fell with emotion. She said, I can still want, can’t I?

That’s how she used to be, passionate about all kinds of things, even those that had nothing to do with her life.

When I watched a movie with Anju, even a movie which I’d seen before, it changed. She forced me to see things I didn’t notice. Sometimes that was good, but mostly it ruined the movie, bringing in questions that no one intended you to have.

But all this is ancient history. We no longer watch movies together.

Enter a buyer. Her mistress needs a serving girl. She can’t decide between the two kidnapped girls—then she chooses the other one because her mistress wants a light-skinned maid around her. And our girl, the pigeon flier’s daughter, is sold to a high-class brothel.

There are a lot of brothels in movies. Anju says it’s because of male fantasies.

They change her name, she becomes a famous singer, known all over Lucknow. She’s desired by many men. Her name? I’ve forgotten it. What does a name matter, anyway? It’s the concept that’s important. She’s the singer-girl whom everyone wants to sleep with but no one wants to marry, just as I’m the husband who lacks husbandliness and you’re the child who escaped death. Though, depending on who’s watching, I could be the man who’s lost his voice and you the child who finds it for him.

The singer falls in love with a rich young nabab, but though he, too, loves her, he must obey his dying mother and marry the woman she chooses. Heartbroken, the singer goes away with another man, although she doesn’t love him. But nothing works out and finally she finds herself back in the brothel.