Vine of Desire

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  For a while the child follows the movement of her mother’s arm, the way it bends and straightens, the way cleanser bubbles bloom at the end of the brush’s bristles. But she doesn’t like the look on her mother’s face, that faraway look, as though the child weren’t there at all. She pulls at her arm, making sounds of protest.

  “Just a minute,” her mother says, “I’ll feed you as soon as I’m done with the tub, okay?”

  It is not okay with the child. She’s more important than any stupid tub, and she knows it. She lets out a full-bodied, indignant howl.

  “All right! All right! I get it!” her mother says, washing hastily and unbuttoning her blouse. The child would prefer something more exciting, those crunchy cereal balls that the man lets her have from his bowl in the morning, perhaps. But she makes do with good grace. Actually, she rather likes the familiarity of her head in the crook of her mother’s elbow, the milk spraying warmth inside her mouth, its comforting smell, which is also the smell of the mother, the smell she would know at once, even in a dark room filled with strangers. She pounds on her mother’s breast approvingly.

  “Ouch!” her mother says. “Quit! It’s time for you to go into your crib.”

  The child has other ideas. She clings to her mother as she tries to lower her into the crib and emits a series of shrieks, each louder than the other. She doesn’t really like to do this—the sound hurts her ears, too. But what option does she have when her mother refuses to be persuaded by gentler means? This strategy has worked well in the past, especially when Aunt Anju is around.

  It’s successful today as well. “Oh, very well!” snaps her mother, hauling her back to Aunt Anju’s bedroom and plopping her—rather ungently, the child thinks—onto the bed. “Spoilt brat!” Perspiration lines her forehead. “I should smack you.” She narrows her eyes and raises her arm.

  The child stops her crying. There’s no longer a need for it, and she isn’t one to waste her efforts. She watches her mother with some curiosity—before today, no one has threatened to hit her. But there’s something else in her gaze, something steady and measuring. She knows they’re engaged in some kind of battle—a staring battle maybe, and she isn’t going to lose. Her mother pulls back her arm, her palm flat and swordlike. Maybe it’s time to let out another wail?

  But, look, she’s biting her lip, backing away. She’s stumbling toward the TV now, rummaging through a pile of children’s videos that the man bought for the child. She slams one of them into the VCR, a last act of temper. The child considers reprimanding her with a sob or two from her considerable repertoire, but a frog puppet has appeared on the screen. It begins to sing a song she knows. She sways from side to side to the beat. Key Largo, Montego … that’s where we wanna go. Everything else dwindles: small stuff, not worth sweating. In the back of her mind, she hears her mother shut the bathroom door. Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty mama. The child knows that she will weep in there for a while. The knowledge makes her suddenly sad, makes her lie down, curled into herself, thumb in her mouth.

  By the time the mother returns, leaving behind a gleaming bathroom that is sure to earn her Aunt Anju’s wrath, the child is asleep. In sleep she senses that her mother’s eyes are reddened, that the end of her blue sari is wound untidily around her slender waist. Even this way, she is beautiful, with the kind of uncared-for beauty that makes people want to be a shield between her and the world. The child knows this because the man has told her so. The mother is smiling a rainy smile at the child, who looks so much like her with her cleft chin and a small mole high on her cheekbone—except there’s an added stubbornness to the child’s mouth, which pouts in sleep. The mother shakes her head. In India this stubbornness would have been a disadvantage, something to be scolded—even beaten—out of a girl. But here she’s not sure. All the rules are different in America, and she knows none of them yet.

  She bends to pick the child up, then pauses.

  “I’m scared you’ll wake up,” she whispers against her forehead. “And we all know what a terror you can be if your nap’s disturbed, don’t we!” She smiles an exhausted smile. All that kneeling and scrubbing and weeping has taken its toll. Is that why she lies down now, with a delicate, catlike yawn, curling her body around the child’s? Or is she merely acquiescing to the child’s wilder will? The child snuggles backward into that smell she knows so well. She is dreaming of the boy again. Cloud boy, she calls him on some days. Sandstorm boy who looks at her with such hunger. Today he flutters over them with pigeon wings. No, no. Not here. She wants to tell him not to be scared. What will be, will be. But she is distracted by the insistent wind, the way it presses against the windowpane, trying to find a crack so it can enter.

  “Ah, mothers and daughters,” she hears her mother sigh, “how we wear each other out! No matter. Anju Ma will be here in an hour to wake us up.”

  Four P.M. Her last class over, Anju stands on a campus pavement fidgeting with her sunglasses, which she wears even to class. She is trying to decide what to do. A part of her yearns homeward, but there’s the matter of the letter to her father. She knows she can’t write that letter in the apartment, its charged, gunpowder air. For that she needs a space empty of history and its attendant expectations.

  It is the year of passings: Ionesco and Kojak, Jackie Onassis from cancer. Anju wonders if they are expected to share the same afterlife space. She fears it might be so. But maybe it is a mistake to fear, perhaps the dead do not care about such things. She thinks of Prem for a speck second, the way one might lay a finger on the coils of a still-hot burner, then snatch it back. Death is the great equalizer. Is this a phrase she created just now, or had she read it somewhere before? To her dismay, she cannot remember. A dark wind tugs at her hair, brings the smell of wet earth into the space between her sunglasses and her eyes. It sends a burger wrapper, a crinkled, attention-catching silver, tumbling down a pathway toward a small concrete building onto whose wall the rain is beginning to brush stroke its transient alphabet. There’s something about that tumble, a gay, I-don’t-care-what-happens abandonment that Anju hasn’t felt in years. She follows it—first her gaze, then her feet—and finds she is at the communications library, a building whose existence was unknown to her until today. Is this another omen? The automatic doors open all at once, like the arms of a long-lost friend. She walks until she finds a room white as the inside of an egg, circular and without windows. This pleases her. She has always thought of windows as distractions, drawing a person out of herself. And right now she needs to delve inward, to dig up the old, buried shards of her life.

  In this amniotic place, Anju pushes her glasses up to her forehead, takes out a sheet of paper and a fountain pen she has carried, with a nostalgia she didn’t know she possessed, all the way from India.

  Dear Unknown Father, she writes.

  On the car radio, a voice informs Sunil that the Pentagon has dropped its eight-billion-dollar Doomsday project, that more Serb planes have been shot down in a no-fly zone, that the Germans have wrested from the French the distinction of being the world’s largest consumers of alcohol.

  “Bully for them,” he says.

  The voice goes on to warn him of a chemical spill on 101 and Montague, traffic backed up to Mathilda Avenue.

  “Shit!” says Sunil. He is like an animal whose hair, ruffled the wrong way by a thoughtless hand, stands up in prickly patches. Whose skin is uneasy with exposure. Can you sense inside him the desire for speed, building like compressed steam? But the four-thirty traffic has him firmly in its embrace. Raindrops gather their fatness against the windshield and trickle lazily downward. He slashes them away with the wipers, which he operates, unnecessarily, at full speed. His handsome lips (Mel Gibson lips, a woman who knew him once said) are thin with annoyance, his fingers tap a staccato code on the steering wheel. He made himself wait in a café, drinking cappuccino after cappuccino until it was time for Anju to be home. Does he think of his act as honorable, or foolish? He hasn’t had lunch and the caffeine
makes him nauseous and jittery, makes him take turns too quickly, without signaling. He gives honking motorists the finger and—finally—roars into the parking lot of the apartment.

  Taking the stairs two at a time, what is Sunil wishing for? He rings the bell. There is no answer. “Out at the mall again, I bet,” he mutters, letting himself in with his key and dropping his briefcase on the couch. He undoes the buttons of his shirt—he’s breathless today, everything tightens its coils around him—and walks into the bedroom. And sees them.

  Dear Unknown Father—

  It’s a bit awkward, as you might imagine, writing to a person who died before I was born. A man I hated all my growing-up years because he destroyed his family. Yes, Father, you destroyed us by dying—a death you brought upon yourself by going off in search of treasure—a foolish, clichéd enterprise which should have remained where it belonged, between the pages of a children’s adventure tale.

  But it isn’t my intention to berate you. Now that I’m mired in the middle years of my own life, I find my old hatred as useless as the adventure you went on. I need instead (the way one needs to know about the genetic defects that kill one’s parents) to know what drove you. Perhaps the same desperation is beginning to drive me. I need to know what you were most afraid of in your life. Because one knows people best through their fears—the ones they overcome, and the ones they are overcome by.

  These are what the people closest to me are afraid of Sunil of earthquakes, flying insects, the sky at dusk, and the loss of control; Sudha of the silence that rises from furniture in an empty room at noon, culinary disasters, and the resurrection of desires she has put to death; Prem (yes, Prem) of dissolvement, the crying of bats and aborted babies, and my despair. Only Dayita among us is afraid of nothing.

  And me—to give you all the things I am afraid of, it would take an aeon. So I will write only of one: love. Love which gives you a taste of itself and makes you greedy for more. You hold it in your addicted hands, terrified by its frailty. It makes you lie incessantly. You would kill anyone—including yourself—to keep it from breaking. Then it breaks anyway.

  All the loves I’ve loved, I’ve lost them—except one. And this one too—I think I hear it cracking underfoot, like lake ice in a thin winter.

  Father, what was it you loved so much that you had to leave us for it?

  —Anju.

  He stands very still in the middle of the bedroom, his unbuttoned shirt fallen from his body. His chest does not rise and fall. He has forgotten to breathe as he stares at the woman and the child on his bed—which makes them, for the moment, his. He looks like a man struck dumb by a miracle.

  The frog video has ended and a static drone comes from the TV. To this dissonant music, Sunil walks to the bed. He looks down at Sudha, her slightly swollen lids, her hair tendriled over his pillow, the sudden excitement of her flared hips. At the child sleeping with her hand fisted around her mother’s finger.

  He kneels by the bed. He kisses her. A feather kiss on the mole on her cheekbone, a breath kiss on her left eye, then her right, and then he can’t stop himself. His lips take hers, her face is in his hands. He will crush her into himself, he will swallow her if that’s the only way for them to be together. This is the kiss he has imagined over a hundred unsatisfied nights. He breathes in the clove scent of her dreams, which will now become his. His arms crush her to him. Her skin makes him drunk with silkiness. He strokes her shoulder blades, the curve of vertebrae, each fitted to the other like pearls on a string. His lips move to the rise of her breasts. Does her body arch up, compliant? If only he could contain himself within this perfect moment, looking neither before nor beyond.

  Then she’s crying out, pushing him away, he cannot read the look on her face, he would like to believe that it is an ambiguous joy, or at least desire, but her words are not ambiguous, Let go of me, let go. She’s hitting out. To save himself from falling, he must take his hands from her, balance on his heels, kneeling by the bed. She sits up, clutching her sari to her face. Only her eyes, wide with shock, are visible above the bunched fabric. The child, too, awake now, stares—first at one, then the other, trying to decide if the situation calls for a smile. The man’s breath makes a crazy, whistling sound in his windpipe. Against the lean brownness of his body, the gleam of his belt buckle. His chest hairs are dark and curly. The child laughs as she reaches out to touch them. That laugh, that touch. They bring reality crashing down around Sunil like the door to a tiger trap.

  In the 7:00 P.M. bus, Anju holds on to the metal armrest of the seat, her thumb caressing its smooth, bluish sheen. She feels a wondrous, party-balloon lightness, as though she might float up at any moment to the roof of the bus. The letter she wrote is safely hidden between the pages of her thickest notebook.

  When she gets off, the rain hits her in immediate, wild sheets. The road has turned into a river, dull and evening-nickeled. Soaked, shivering, she hugs the bag to her chest, hoping the letter will stay dry. Rain falls on the lenses of her sunglasses, further dimming her vision. She is elated by blindness, by the mysteries of unseen puddles.

  In the parking lot Sunil swings open the door of the car where he has been sitting, and calls her name. She gives a gasp, her fingers tightening on the backpack.

  “You scared me!” she says. “I didn’t see you in the dark!”

  “You’d see a hell of a lot better if you took those blasted glasses off. How come you’re so late?”

  Anju is taken aback by his vehemence. She squints and bends forward to look into his face, but keeps the glasses on.

  “Well?”

  “I … something came up … I needed to do some work in the library. I lost track of time. Why are you so mad?”

  “I was concerned, that’s all,” says Sunil. He steps out of the car, his shirt turning dark in the rain. Water flows over his face, obscuring his expression. “Look at you, dripping wet. What if you get sick again? Can’t you carry an umbrella, at least? Here, let me take your books.”

  “No, no, it’s quite all right—you’ve got your briefcase to carry.”

  “Anju!” says Sunil in exasperation. “Why must you always fight me when I try to do something for you?”

  Anju relinquishes her backpack with reluctance and watches as he swings it cavalierly over his shoulder. To keep herself from asking him to give it back, she says, as she follows him up the stairs, “Was the traffic bad? Did you just get here, too?”

  “The traffic is always bad,” says Sunil, not looking back.

  Inside the apartment, Sudha is trying to chop onions for a curry. She cannot make up her mind as to what kind of curry it should be—some of the onion pieces are long and curved as for kurma, others chunky, as for chochori. Their edges are bruised because Sudha, usually meticulous about such things, has picked the wrong kind of knife. Large and thick, meant for cutting meat, it was the first thing that came to her hand as she felt about in the drawer. From time to time she pauses in her chopping to heft it in her fist like a weapon. But she doesn’t see it—or the onions, or the dal that’s on the verge of boiling over, or Dayita, who’s playing in the living room with a metal paperweight she’s been told not to touch. She tilts her head, the way one might when holding to a dismayed ear an expensive watch that has stopped in spite of a warranty.

  Dayita bangs the paperweight on the table. She likes the sound it makes, a solid thump, followed by a pulled-out vibration that hangs in the air, and decides to make a game out of it. Bang! Bang! Bang! Until it jerks Sudha out of her trance. But where on another day she would have snatched the paperweight from Dayita and possibly given her a slap on the behind, today she merely looks. Is there something new in Dayita’s face, that awareness by which children begin to separate themselves from their parents? Sudha abandons the onions and the dal, which is by now boiling over, making a yellow mess on the stove, and steps into the bathroom. She searches in the mirror for visual manifestations of the afternoon’s upheaval. But there isn’t always such a straight l
ine between cause and effect. Her face remains lovely as ever, not a wrinkle added, not an iota of luminosity taken away. Only the keenest sight would detect the faint swelling of her lips, which she scrubbed over and over after Sunil, shirt in one hand, briefcase in the other, stumbled from the apartment. Anju, busy with her own dissimulations, will not be capable of such vision.

  Once, when Sudha and Anju were teenagers, Pishi had told them the tale of Damayanti, a queen so beautiful that the gods grew jealous of her husband. They took away all he had and forced him to wander in the wilderness for many years. “Be careful,” Pishi had ended. “A woman’s beauty can be her wealth, but also her curse.”

  Anju had wrinkled her nose ruefully. “I guess I don’t have to worry, then!” But Sudha, who would usually rush in at such moments to say that Anju was beautiful, too, and, besides, she was smart, which was more important, had been too lost in her thoughts to say anything.

  Now Sudha brings her hands to her face and traces the outlines of the bones. Is it true that beauty can be a curse? She moves her fingers slowly, cautiously. The way a doctor might touch the victim of an accident, feeling for fractures. Or the way a lover might touch his beloved’s face. The way Sunil touched her.

  Dinner is preceded by a tournament of circumventions, questions shot around the table, parried, shot back in the form of other questions.

  She: Goodness, Anju! How late you are! I was killing myself with worry! Why didn’t you call? What were you doing all this time?

  She: Please! The way the two of you are going on, it’s like I disappeared for a whole month. I’m a big girl, okay? And sometimes I need to stay on campus and catch up on things I need to do. Can we talk about something else now—like what’s for dinner. I’m starved.