Oleander Girl

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Group Guide

  About Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  For my three men:

  Murthy

  Anand

  Abhay

  And for my grandfather,

  whose life inspired this story

  Oh love is the crooked thing,

  There is nobody wise enough

  To find out all that is in it,

  For he would be thinking of love

  Till the stars had run away,

  And the shadows eaten the moon;

  Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,

  One cannot begin it too soon.

  —“The Young Man’s Song,” William Butler Yeats

  ONE

  I’m swimming through a long, underwater cavern flecked with blue light, the cavern of love, with Rajat close behind me. We’re in a race, and so far I’m winning because this is my dream. Sometimes when I’m dreaming, I don’t know it, but tonight I do. Sometimes when I’m awake, I wonder if I’m dreaming. That, however, is another story.

  I smile and feel my mouth filling with cool, silver bubbles. Rajat’s fingers brush the backs of my knees. Even in my dream I know that if I slow down just a bit, he’ll grab my waist and pull me to him for a mischievous kiss. Imagining that kiss sends a shudder of pleasure through me. But I don’t want it yet. The chase is too much fun. I surge away with a splashy kick. Hey! he calls out in spluttering protest, and I grin wider. Competitive, he slices through the water with his fierce butterfly stroke and lunges for my ankle. I wait for his strong, electric grip to send a current through my veins. My mouth floods with anticipation of our kiss.

  Then out of nowhere a wave breaks over me. Salt and sand are on my tongue. I try to spit them out, but they fill my mouth, choking me. Where’s Rajat when I need his help? Gasping, I thrash about and wake in my bed, tangled in my bedsheets.

  In my mother’s bed, I should say. The bed I used every year when I came home from boarding school for the holidays. The bed that’s made with the same sheets she covered herself with as a girl.

  As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I know at once that someone is in the room. My heart flails around. It’s impossible. I always lock the door before going to sleep, and the window is barred. But there it is, in the armchair in the corner of the bedroom: a still female form, black against the darkness of the room, looking toward me.

  “Mother?” I whisper, my fear replaced by a yearning that’s as old and illogical as anything I can remember.

  I know so little about my mother, only that she died eighteen years ago, giving birth to me—a few months after my father, an ambitious law student, had passed away in a car accident. Perhaps she died of a broken heart. I never knew for sure because no one would speak to me of them. My grandparents had to put aside their own broken hearts to care for me, and I’m grateful: they did it well. Still, all through my years growing up, I longed for a visitation from my mother. The girls in my boarding school whispered stories about such occurrences, deceased parents appearing to save their offspring from calamity. I prayed for it in secret and, when that didn’t work, tried to put myself in calamity’s way, figuring either my mother or father might appear. But I only ended up with bruises, sprains, a case of the whooping cough, and, finally, a broken ankle. My adventures led to detentions, confiscation of pocket money, and a somewhat exaggerated reputation as a daredevil. They also resulted in numerous tongue-lashings from our harried principal, which didn’t matter to me, and, finally, a long-distance phone call from my grandfather, which did.

  “Korobi,” Grandfather said in that stern, grainy voice that I had adored from babyhood, “I’m too old for this. Besides, why would a smart girl like you do a stupid thing like walking on the upstairs window ledge?”

  The canny old rascal. He knew me well enough to appeal to my three major weaknesses: my vanity, my guilt, and, most of all, my love for him. He was, to me, father and mother rolled into one, and the thought that I had distressed and disappointed him made me burst into tears. Thus ended my attempts at forcing my parents into making an appearance.

  Now, years after I had armored my heart and accepted that my mother was gone from my life, here she is.

  How can I be sure it is her? There are some things we know, in our breath, in our bones.

  It makes a certain sense that she should visit me now. Tomorrow I am to take my first real step into adulthood: I will be engaged to Rajat and thus begin the journey away from this family into another one. Perhaps my mother has come to say good-bye, to give me her blessing? Is she concerned? A strange tension seems to emanate from her. Perhaps she can’t go to her final rest until she’s certain that I am loved. I think I know why.

  Some years back, during one of my vacations, I’d been going through Grandfather’s library looking for something to read. I finally chose an old book of poems, its pages thumbed soft with loving use. As I flipped through it, a thin sheet of blue paper fell to the floor. Someone had left a half-finished letter inside. As I read it, my heart beat so hard I thought it would break through my chest.

  Dearest,

  You are in my thoughts every minute. I can’t believe that only three months have passed since the last time I held you in my arms to say good-bye. I thought I could handle this separation, but I can’t. Each day I ache for your touch. Each night I think of the way I felt complete in your arms. I talk to the baby inside me—I’m sure it will be a girl—about you all the time. I want to make sure our child knows how your love surrounds her even though you are so impossibly far away, in a whole different world—

  It was beautiful and heartbreaking, this note from my mother to my dead father. It brought them close to me, made them real in a way none of my imaginings had. I couldn’t share it with either of my grandparents, but I memorized every word on the page. I hid the note carefully in the bottom of my trunk—my first, cherished secret—and took it back to boarding school with me. Nights when I couldn’t sleep, I would hold it in my hand and wish that someday I might find a love like theirs.

  “Rajat is a wonderful man, Mother,” I say, throwing off the bedsheets and sitting up straight in my excitement. “How I wish you could have met him, and Father, too. Then you’d have no doubts that I’m making the right choice. He’s smart, funny, and caring—not only to me but to my grandparents. I’ve loved him from the moment I met him—it sounds silly, Mother, but it’s true. At first I didn’t think it would work. He comes from such a different kind of family. They’re so rich and modern and fashionable that it’s a little scary. And you know Grandfather—proud to bursting of our heritage, of the old ways. But I was amazed at how well they got along from the first. Maybe it’s because Grandfather saw that Rajat loves me just the way I am, that he never wants me to change. And I—I feel complete in his arms, Mother, just like you’d written in
your letter. Why, I love him so much, I could die for him!”

  My mother makes a small, agitated movement, as though distressed at something I’ve said. She turns toward the window. Is she leaving? Desperate to recapture her attention, I blurt out something I haven’t confessed to anyone else.

  “The real reason I love him isn’t his good looks or charm—it’s because underneath it, I can sense a secret sadness. No one else can see it. No one else can cure it. But I’m going to find out what it is, and I’m going to make him happy!”

  I’m breathless from my confession, but still the air in the room hangs uncertain, incomplete. My mother continues to look out the window. Why will she not speak to me? Where is the blessing kiss I’ve wanted all my life, cool as a dew-drenched breeze on my forehead?

  A terrible thought strikes me: Has she come, like ghosts in tales, to warn me of an impending disaster?

  I struggle to get to my feet, but my body is suddenly too heavy.

  I will go to her. I will find out what she isn’t telling me.

  Suddenly the window behind her is filled with light. Outside I see an ocean, over which a sun is setting. Have I fallen, then, from one dream into another? She points over the ocean, leaning toward it with such sad longing that sorrow twists my heart. I understand.

  She hasn’t come to learn about me. All the things I said to her—she probably knew them already, being dead. She has appeared now, instead, to tell me something.

  But what?

  “Talk to me, Mother.”

  This time when she turns to me, I notice that my dream mother has no mouth. She points again.

  “There’s something out there you want? Beyond the ocean?”

  She nods. Her face is glowing because I’ve finally understood. Now she points at me.

  “You want me to go and get it?”

  She nods.

  “Where must I go? What am I to look for?”

  My mother’s frame shivers with effort as though she longs to speak. She begins to dissolve. I can glimpse the ocean through her tattered body, waves breaking apart on rocks. An urgent sorrow radiates from her disappearing form. Then she is gone, and I am finally awake, blinking in the first rays of the sun entering the room through the bars.

  I need someone to interpret this dream. It means something, I’m sure of that, coming at this crucial moment in my life. I can’t go to Grandfather. When my mother died, he destroyed all her photographs because he couldn’t bear to look at them. When I was six, he told me never to bring her up. It was too painful.

  I imagined it at night when I lay in bed, alone with my longing: that sharp, silver word, mother, like a chisel, chipping away at Grandfather’s heart.

  Perhaps I can tell my dream to Grandmother. She, too, is reluctant to speak of my mother—but she can be cajoled.

  The household at 26 Tarak Prasad Roy Road has been abustle since daybreak, preparing for the engagement. The maid has ground the spices for the celebratory lunch and chopped a mountain of vegetables. The yawning cook has cut up the rui fish and marinated it in salt and turmeric. In the Durga mandir, the family temple established over a hundred years ago, old Bahadur yells threats at the gardener boy until the cracked marble floor is mopped to his satisfaction. There Sarojini hurries to arrange lamps, camphor holders, incense, sandalwood powder, marigolds, large copper platters, fruit, milk sweets, rice grains, gold coins, and multicolored pictures depicting a pantheon of gods. Is she forgetting anything? She loves the temple, but it also makes her nervous. Too many memories lurk in its sooty alcoves.

  On one side she has unrolled mats for the priest and for her husband, Bimal Prasad Roy, retired barrister and proud grandfather of the bride-to-be; on the other she has placed four low chairs. The chairs, which have been the cause of some contention, are for the Boses, family of the groom-to-be, because they are modern and elegant and thus unused to sitting cross-legged on the ground.

  Bimal had been dead set against such westernized nonsense. “For generations we’ve been praying on the floor. They can’t do it for one day? Sacrifice a little comfort for the goddess’s blessing?”

  But ultimately Sarojini, who has had ample opportunity over fifty-five years of marriage to perfect her cajoling, had prevailed.

  Reentering the house, Sarojini is swept into a sea of commotion. The milkman is rattling the side door; the phone rings; on the Akashbani Kalikata radio station, the newscaster announces the date: Feburary 27, 2002; Cook berates the neighbor’s striped cat for attempting to filch a piece of fish. Bimal summons Cook in querulous tones. Where on earth is his morning tea? His Parle-G biscuits? Cook replies (but not loud enough for Bimal to hear) that she doesn’t have ten arms like the goddess. The commentator on Akashbani, who is discussing the growing tension between India and Pakistan since the testing of the Agni missile, is interrupted by a news bulletin: over fifty people dead in a train fire in Gujarat.

  So many disasters in the world, Sarojini thinks as she climbs the stairs to Korobi’s bedroom. A pity that one had to happen today, a day of more happiness than their family has seen in a long time. She opens the door to Korobi’s room to help her granddaughter get ready for the ceremony.

  There’s the girl, dawdling on the veranda in her thin nightgown for all the world to gawk at! Sarojini is about to scold her, but, leaning over the rail toward the row of oleanders that Anu had loved, Korobi looks so like her dead mother that the words die in Sarojini’s throat. Not her face or fair skin—in those Korobi resembles Sarojini herself, but that posture, that troublesome yearning toward the world, that radiant smile as she turns toward Sarojini.

  In any case, Sarojini is no good at scolding. Bimal has always complained that she spoiled the girls—first Anu and then little Korobi—and thus did them a disservice. Sarojini admits he has a point; girls have to be toughened so they can survive a world that presses harder on women, and surely Bimal does a good job of that. But deep in a hidden place inside her that is stubborn as a mudfish, Sarojini knows she is right, too. Being loved a little more than necessary arms a girl in a different way.

  “Come on now, Korobi, bathwater’s getting cold.”

  Not that Sarojini had much of an opportunity to spoil Korobi. As soon as the girl was five, Bimal made arrangements with that boarding school in the freezing mountains. Sarojini begged to keep the child at home. She even wept, which was uncommon for her, and mortifying. After Anu’s death she had vowed to keep her griefs to herself.

  “Look what happened the last time I listened to you,” Bimal said.

  A rejoinder shot up to her tongue. Whose fault is it that my daughter’s dead? At the last moment she pulled it back into herself. If the words had crystallized into being, she couldn’t have continued living with Bimal, she couldn’t have borne it. But she didn’t know any other way of being. Also this: she loved him. His suffering stung her. Yes, he suffered for Anu’s death, though he would not speak of it. Even now he startles awake at night with a groan, and lying next to him, Sarojini hears—sometimes for an hour—the ragged, sleepless thread of his breathing.

  But this is no time for morbid thoughts. Luncheon smells rise from the kitchen—khichuri made with golden mung and gopal bhog rice from their ancestral village, sautéed brinjals, cabbage curry cooked with pure ghee and cardamoms. Sarojini will have to supervise the fish fry. Last time Cook, who is getting old, scorched the fillets and collapsed into tears. But first Sarojini must get Korobi dressed. The child is always dreaming. Listen to her now, singing with abandon in the bathroom as though it were a holiday.

  Sarojini knocks on the bathroom door. “Hurry, hurry, so much to be done. Sari, hair, makeup, jewelry. The mustard-seed ceremony to avert the evil eye. If you’re not ready by the time Rajat’s party arrives, your grandfather will have a fit.”

  While Korobi was away at school, all year Sarojini would hunger for winter break, when icicles hung from the eaves of the old school buildings and the children were sent down to the plains. But somehow when Korobi came home
, the two of them never got to do the things Sarojini had planned. To share the special recipes that she was famed for, to pass down secrets her own mother had given her. It seemed that whenever she tried to teach Korobi how to make singaras stuffed with cauliflower, or layer the woolens with camphor balls to save them from moths, Bimal called the girl away to play chess or accompany him to the book fair. In between, armies of tutors invaded the house, dinning the next year’s curriculum into Korobi so she could be the top student in her class. Korobi didn’t complain; she adored her grandfather and wanted him to be proud of her.

  When Sarojini ventured to suggest that Korobi needed time to be a child, Bimal said, “You want to ruin her brain quite completely?”

  Only at bedtime did Sarojini get her granddaughter to herself. “Tell me about Ma,” the girl would whisper in the dark, the forbidden request forging a bond between them. Sarojini would swallow the ache in her throat and offer Korobi something innocuous: a childhood escapade, a favorite color, a half-remembered line from a poem that Anu liked to recite.

  “Why did she name me Korobi?’

  “Because she loved oleanders so much, shona.”

  “But they’re poisonous! You told me so. Why would she name me after something so dangerous?”

  Sarojini didn’t know the answer to that.

  Now Korobi is getting married, leaving Sarojini struggling under the weight of unsaid things, things she had promised Bimal she would never speak of.

  She pushes the thought away, unfolding the stiff pink silk sari she had bought, so many years ago, for Anu. She tucks it around her granddaughter’s slender waist, admonishing the girl when she fidgets, making sure the pleats are straight and show off the gold-embroidered border. When Sarojini is satisfied, she starts on the jewelry—her beloved dowry jewelry, which she made Bimal get out of the bank vault, even though he had fussed and said it was quite unnecessary. She pins the gold disk in the shape of a sunburst to Korobi’s braid and stands back to evaluate. The girl has lovely hair, not that she takes care of it. Mostly it’s left untied, a mass of tangled curls cascading down her back. Where she got those curls, Sarojini can’t figure out. Everyone else in the family has stick-straight hair.