The truth is, I don’t remember how my mother managed to get hold of the theater money. Those days, I didn’t pay attention to such things. In the self-absorbed way of children, I took it for granted that she would provide what I needed.
What I do remember is the theater.
I wish you could see it, kiddo. It was the most immense hall I’d ever been in, filled with maroon velvet seats so soft that when you sat, you sank into them all the way to your hips. A maroon velvet curtain hung in front of the stage, trimmed with thick gold-tasseled ropes. In the middle of the ceiling, there was a huge white-and-gold lotus, and from it hung an equally huge chandelier that threw mysterious shadows down on us, as though we were in some enchanted cave. All along the cornices, little lights flickered like flames until a flute started playing. Then they went out, leaving us in a hushed dark.
I went back to see the place once, after I was grown and in college, but it was gone and some kind of air-conditioned market had taken its place. I was sad, but in a way I was relieved. For the rest of my life now, I could continue thinking of it the way I remembered it, without my critical adult eye ruining the spell.
And the characters, when they appeared—how can I describe them to you! To me, a boy from class five who had never been taken to the movies, they were like gods. Their gestures were grand and true and touched something in me I didn’t even know was there. The priest was dressed in a white dhoti and wore rings in his ears. His bald head shone with divine light, and his wooden clogs clacked across the stage with an authority that made me hold completely still. The soldiers raised their deadly swords all at once as they marched; their shields were decorated with glittery bronze studs; their commander wore a breastplate of gold and shouted orders in a terrifying voice as he directed them to capture the thief. Even the thief, dressed in tattered robes, with blacked-in circles under his crazed eyes and manacles around his ankles, was a creature out of myth.
For months afterward, I’d act out the story at home in the afternoons, sometimes for my mother, but mostly for myself. I’d take turns being each of the characters: the saintly priest who takes in the escaped thief, who has reached his home on a stormy night; the priest’s suspicious sister, who warns him not to trust a stranger, especially one who looks so desperate. The soldiers who spy the thief and raise an outcry as they vault over the sofa in our living room. I improved on the dialogue as I went along by adding long, emotional harangues. I had found my life’s vocation, I told my mother. I was going to be an actor. She smiled unhappily. (But I was used to that.)
Most of all, I enjoyed playing the part of the thief. In the middle of the night, when the priest and his sister were asleep, I would rise from my mat and, on tiptoe, reach for the gold lamp in the alcove. My face would be filled with frenzy, the face of a man calloused by the world’s cruelties. What did I care that the lamp was the priest’s one valuable possession? Fool, I sneered, as I swept it into my sack and climbed out of the window. When the commander caught me and brought me back to the priest for identification, I was unrepentant. I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned back against the wall. Do your worst, I dared them. It was only when the priest declared that he had given me the gold lamp as a gift that my face grew uncertain and my hands began to tremble. My knees grew weak until I sank, sacklike, onto my mother’s living room carpet. I lowered my head to the floor in respect and said to the priest, Forgive me, I am your servant for life. The room filled with applause from Manik and my mother. I kept my head down as long as I could. I didn’t want to return to my life.
I thought about the play a lot over the next few years, even after I’d exchanged my dream of being an actor for one of becoming a judge who presided over criminal cases, sentencing men to death—or life. There was something about the play that kept disturbing me. It was only later, after coming across another play of a very different kind, that I realized what it was. I really liked the guy who stole the lamp, I really wanted to believe that he changed into a good man in the end—but I couldn’t. It didn’t help that our teacher told us that the story was from a novel written by a famous French author. People didn’t change from bad to good—bam!—just like that. (Every night when my father got home I had firsthand proof of it.)
I bet you’re wondering about that other play. It was Macbeth. We were reading it for class ten English—I’ll tell you that story another day. But there’s a scene where Lady Macbeth is trying to persuade Macbeth, who’s very loyal to the king, that he should kill him when he’s visiting their castle. Finally, even though he’s reluctant, Macbeth agrees—and that’s it for him.
Sometimes at night, I’d find myself thinking about that. Why didn’t Macbeth see what he was getting into? I’d think angrily. He was a smart man, and pretty darn brave. Why couldn’t he stop himself then, or at least later, when he’s starting to kill all kinds of people—friends, women, babies like you?
Let me tell you, this wasn’t like me—I was the kind of boy who ran around with friends all day and fell asleep as soon as he hit the bed. If I thought at all, it was about solid things, happy things: football, what Ma would fix me for lunch the next day, the girl who stood on the balcony opposite my bedroom to comb her hair. But what happened to Macbeth, it scared me. A few times that year, I dreamed about a man—I didn’t know who it was—stepping through a bog. Only he didn’t know it was a bog—it looked like a gorgeous tropical garden, vines loaded with fruit, birds singing, monkeys swinging from branches—and then, just as he’s reaching out to grab a ripe mango, he slips, and before he knows it, he’s in mud up to his waist and it’s sucking him in. Down, down, his chest is gone, he’s shouting for help, he stretches up his neck, there’s mud in his mouth and eyes, and, finally, just like in the adventure movies (by now I’d cut classes with my friends and seen several), his fingers claw the air and disappear. I’d wake up from that dream sweating, my mouth chalky with the taste of clay.
It was an important lesson. Too bad I didn’t learn it.
Good people turn bad. I believed it then. I know it today. Yes, kiddo, now that you’ve fallen asleep—your head heavy on my collarbone, your breath tickling my chin, so much trust I don’t deserve—I can say it. I know it from my own life.
I guess there are things you can do to stop yourself from falling into the bog. But most of us don’t see them until we’re in up to our armpits. Maybe that’s what happened to O. J., too.
What I want to know, before I sink farther and my hands disappear, is there something out there that I can grab to pull myself out? Or is it true, like with Macbeth, that once you start going bad, you might as well give up, because there’s no way back?
Eleven
Time passes. The hours rise and fall like the waves of the Pacific—which is only fifty miles to the west, though no one, looking at this apartment building squeezed beside a dozen others and stained by the freeway’s coughs, would believe it. The hours are insidious. They wait for a chance to carry lives away, like unmoored boats swept out to sea with the tide. Already they are lapping at Anju’s feet.
Anju has started staying longer on campus. I never know when I’ll be back, she told Sudha. Don’t wait for me at the bus stop. Sudha drew her brows together in a frown, but Anju offered neither explanation nor apology.
Some days she goes for coffee with the women from the writing group. She listens to them but says little. Most of the time she’s busy trying to keep her astonishment from showing. They speak of drugs in the inner city, latchkey children, candlelight vigils for victims of domestic violence. They plan marches, work on placards for demonstrations. Who are these women? she thinks. Where were they all my life? Even their everyday talk—papers and boyfriends, vegan recipes, an art movie at Camera One, a new salon where they dye your hair with natural dyes—seems fantastic to her, a costume that her tongue would like to try on. And yet they make her feel lonelier. Large chunks of herself will always be unintelligible to them: the joint family she grew up in, her arranged marriage, the way she fe
ll in love with her husband, the tension in her household, that ménage à trois, Indian style. Only Sudha, she thinks unhappily, can ever understand these.
On other days she sits by herself at the edge of the quad, watching. A boy in a punk haircut with a razor blade hanging from his earlobe, whizzing past on a skateboard, a young woman in slacks and a brown veil that covers her hair, an older man who carries a cat under his arm and speaks urgently and continuously to himself, an Asian couple, hands waving as they argue with energy in their language. Watching them sometimes, she forgets to breathe. That’s how much she wants to glean their interiors—what they do when alone, what they wish for as they throw a penny into a fountain, where they are afraid to go in their sleep. She is convinced their lives are more interesting than her own. But perhaps all who hope to be writers must believe this? She holds them in her mind like Rubik’s Cubes, turning them over to see how they are put together. She imagines their problems in jewel colors, nothing like her own fatiguing, banal troubles. In a notebook that is filling up fast, she writes to her father, I love the problems of strangers because I am not responsible for solving them.
In the evenings, when Anju returns, she stands at the door of her apartment for a while before she unlocks it. It is an effort to bring her eyes to focus on the door, its fake wood-grain pattern. She reels her thoughts into the confines of her body, the confines of the conversations she must pick up on the other side of that door. It is like waking—or perhaps like entering a not-so-pleasant, recurrent dream, this life that has turned out so different from what she hoped for. And yet it is her life—just as the woman inside is her much-beloved cousin, though of late their minds repel each other like the opposite poles of magnets. The cousin she herself called to America (but why? she cannot quite remember), and to whom her husband is (still? once again?) attracted. Ah, did they think she doesn’t see? She sees it all. What she cannot ascertain is how she feels.
Her life, her cousin, her husband. Her son. (For even now she thinks of Prem as she glides across the bedsheets, away from Sunil’s merman touch.) All these possessives, hanging from her like anchors. Anju, who feels the seductive hours lick at her feet, longs to loosen herself from them, but doesn’t know how.
It is the night of the anniversary party, and the women are in Anju’s bedroom, getting dressed. They have handed Dayita, lacy as a confection in a white dress with satin bows, to Sunil, severe and handsome in his one expensive suit. He looks at his watch with some impatience, but not too much. In between watching the news—detectives, police statements, a car chase as exciting as any in a James Bond movie, old clips of O. J., the distraught parents of the young man whose body was found beside Nicole’s—he listens curiously to the wisps of laughter that float out from the bedroom. Perhaps he, too, is excited. It’s been a long time since he has been to a fancy affair like tonight’s.
Inside, Sudha and Anju help each other with their saris, making sure the pleats are even, pinning the anchal to the shoulder so that the gold design on the edge is displayed to advantage. Their movements are sure and fluid, the intimate dance of their girlhood that they are enacting again, that they are delighted to find they haven’t forgotten. They brush the backs of each other’s necks with fragrant powder, place a sparkling bindi in the center of each other’s forehead. With intense concentration each puts mascara on the other’s lashes and blows on it gently. Sudha wants to bundle her hair into a bun, but Anju will not let her. She brushes it until it falls in a shining mass to Sudha’s waist. When they have hooked the clasps of each other’s necklaces, they look at each other in the narrow bathroom mirror and smile. It is a smile inlaid with sadness. What they have recaptured here, they know, is only an illusion. By tomorrow, it will have dissipated into dust.
“You look like a water spirit who’s stepped out of a forest lake at dawn,” Sudha says, touching the winking diamonds at Anju’s throat.
“And you’re like one of the dancing apsaras in the courts of the gods, someone they would willingly give up their godhood to win!”
They laugh at the formal extravagance of their similes. “All those romantic tales Pishi filled our heads with, they don’t fit our lives anymore,” Sudha says. “Not that they ever did.”
“Yeah, we’re more like Cinderella, to be turned to servant girls at the stroke of midnight, back to our daily lives of washing dishes and chopping cabbage for curry and writing term papers!”
“Speaking of servant girls”—Sudha hesitates, then plunges on—“do you remember Mangala?”
Anju creases her brow, taken aback by the sudden change in subject. “Mangala? Mangala who … ? Oh, I think I know…. Back in Calcutta, right? That poor woman—”
“Ladies!” calls Sunil, rapping at the bedroom door. “It’s seven-thirty already. Would you perhaps like to get to the party before it ends?”
“We’re done,” Anju calls back. She holds out her hand for Sudha. “And when you see us, you’ll be forced to admit it was worth the wait!”
“Go on,” Sudha says. “I’ll be with you in just a moment.” She shuts the bathroom door behind Anju and stares with narrowed eyes in the mirror. What does she see?
It is the year of taking risks, of facing consequences. In Bangladesh a woman writer criticizes the Quran and must go underground to escape the fatwa. In Abidjan a twenty-year ban against big-game hunting is lifted in the hope of attracting tourist money. And here in a home not hers, Sudha, servant girl turned apsara for a night, a loveliness for the gods to squabble over, trails her finger over the spot in the mirror where Anju’s reflection had been.
“Send me away, Anju,” she says. “Send me away before it’s too late.”
Chopra’s house is huge and pink, like a giant, lighted cake plopped down on a bald stretch of hillside. There’s a uniformed white guard at the gate, to whom Sunil has to show his invitation, then a circular driveway with an illuminated fountain and Grecian-style statuary, mostly nymphs at various stages of undress, or plump, peeing cherubs.
“I feel like I’m inside the villain’s mansion in a bad Hindi movie,” Anju says.
“You’re right about the villain part,” Sunil says.
More uniforms ahead, bustling around Benzes and Jaguars. One of them takes the car keys from Sunil. Another opens the doors for the women. Sunil watches thoughtfully as his old Ford disappears around the bend of the drive. “C’mon, kid,” he says to Dayita, swinging her up. “Let’s eat them out of house and home.”
The inside of the house is a dazzling assemblage of glittering surfaces—marble floors, mirrored walls, crystal chandeliers, glasswork on loud cushions that line overstuffed sofas, paintings studded with rubies and emeralds that look suspiciously real. And, everywhere, multicolored Mylar balloons announcing that it’s a Happy Anniversary.
“I love it,” Anju whispers. “It’s in such splendidly bad taste!”
“It almost makes you want to take a vow of poverty,” Sunil whispers back.
“I thought we already had,” says Anju, then nudges him with her elbow. “Just kidding!”
Sudha doesn’t join their conversation. She’s examining one of the paintings, a miniature, the head of a princess dressed medieval-style in a diaphanous veil through which the jewels at her nose and ears shine. It’s beautiful, or would be if it weren’t hung next to a wincingly orange batik of a mother elephant with her calf. What’s going through her mind at her first exposure to wealth in America? Admiration? Disgust? Envy? Is she wondering why Sunil, with his haunted, brilliant eyes, is still living in a two-room apartment, while Chopra wallows in wealth? Is she imagining to how much better use she would put this money if it were hers?
“Ah, I see you’re looking at our Tanjore painting,” says a voice at her elbow. It is a plump, diminutive woman with very pink lips and frosted eye shadow, and arms heaped with gold bangles that match the glittery furnishings. “Chopra bought a dozen of those on our last trip to India. He’s crazy about art, as you can tell.” She gestures around the room wi
th a diamond-laden hand, adjusts the folds of her gold-inlaid pink chiffon sari, then looks suddenly suspicious. “We haven’t met before, have we? I’m Mrs. Pinky Chopra. And who might you be?”
Sudha should be faltering at the rudeness of the question, to look around for Anju and Sunil to validate her presence. But no. “I’m Sudha Chatterjee,” she says calmly. “Visiting from Calcutta. Your husband is my brother-in-law’s client.” Her words are as cold and distinct as silver coins falling. Her poised smile indicates that Mrs. Chopra might have all the money in the world, but she possesses something more important. She brings her hands together in the briefest of namaskars, a gesture which discourages familiarity, while Mrs. Chopra, backpedaling, gushes about how wonderful it is to meet her.
Have we underestimated Sudha? All this while our vision has been colored by Anju’s, who can’t help seeing her still as the girl she grew up with, always longing for the impossible, always needing to be protected from reality. But this lifted, burnished face, this steely curve of throat that says, I won’t let you put me down—this must be how she survived her youth in a society that dismissed her as the poor cousin. She walks across the room, her back erect. Here is the woman who cut through her mother-in-law’s plots to control her womb. Who stepped from the security of wifehood onto the stony path of being a mother, alone, in a country where such things meant shame. Who braved the new rules of a new continent because she wanted more in life than a man to take care of her.
Which is the real truth of Sudha? Might as well ask which is the truth of the turtle, the soft flesh its predators crave, or the shell that protects it from them?
She makes her way past crowds of guests; she accepts a glass of wine from a proffered tray; she sees Anju and Sunil and Dayita and waves to them but does not stop. They look so complete without her, the man and woman nestled close against the press of strangers, the child in his arms who sees but doesn’t hold out her hands for her. Does this hurt Sudha? There is a heightened color in her cheeks, but there may be many reasons for that.
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