Vine of Desire

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  I’m sorry I had to take Dayita away from you. That’s my biggest regret. Don’t worry, okay? I’ll be in touch.

  Sunil,

  I can’t give you what you want. For me, you’ll always be my sister’s husband. And I’ll always be your wife’s sister. We can’t forget it, no matter what we convince ourselves of right now.

  I’ve been no good for you, ever since the beginning. I shouldn’t have come to America. There are so many things I shouldn’t have done, I could fill a book with them. What’s the use?

  Whatever mistakes we’ve made, let’s put them behind us. Let’s not encourage them to grow until they crush our lives.

  I’m starting over. I hope you will, too, with Anju. It’s best for us not to be in touch again.

  There’s a lot of strength in you, and goodness and intelligence. I pray you’ll draw on them as you make your next decisions.

  I’ll always be grateful to you for all the love you gave Dayita.

  I hate the letters: prim, abrupt, inadequate. Filled with clichés, they say nothing of all the things wrenching at my insides. And, yet, what can I write? What happened between Sunil and me is his secret, too. I have no right to lighten my heart by confessing it to Anju. That decision will have to be his.

  I don’t seal the letters. I don’t mark them private. Maybe if they each read the other’s, the letters will help them talk the way they should have talked a long time ago.

  I wait nervously on the curb with my suitcases and Dayita’s stroller, shifting from one foot to the other. Dayita rattles the bar of the stroller, points in the direction of our usual walk.

  “Park!” she commands. “Park!” She can’t understand why we have to keep standing here. Her face crumples in preparation for a robust wail—just what I need today! I search in my pockets and come up with the teething ring I picked up at the last minute. For the moment, at least, she’s pacified. Another debt I owe Sunil.

  I notice that I’m wearing the same pair of old jeans that I wore for my date with Lalit. The irony of it! A bitter laughter is building up inside me. Will I see Lalit again? And if I do, what can I say to him, after what happened today? But I have more immediate worries. What if Anju comes back early? Or Sunil? Every time a vehicle swerves around the corner, I cringe, willing myself to grow small and invisible. I must be emanating some type of distress signal, because passersby stare at me strangely. If this were India, at least half of them would know me. They’d ask me a thousand questions, offer to help, give advice, maybe even escort me back home. Thank God for the impersonal customs of America.

  Finally—but, no, it’s exactly an hour and a half—Lupe drives up. Her car is small and nondescript, perhaps intentionally so. A woman of resources, she’s managed to make sense of my garbled directions, and even found a car seat for Dayita. I slide a sideways glance at her as I get into the front seat. She could be anywhere between forty and fifty, with a large, calm forehead. A slight sag to her cheeks, sharp lines running downward from the sides of her nose which deepen as she says hello. She doesn’t quite smile, though she’s pleasant enough. A dark blue pantsuit, with authoritative shoulders, smart but not showy. The only thing about her that surprises me is her hair, lush and black, all the way to her shoulder blades. She maneuvers the car onto the freeway between two monster trucks without blinking an eye. If she were in my situation, would she be running off like this? I don’t think so. I watch her hands resting easily on the wheel and long for some of their confidence.

  As we drive to Berkeley, I look around Lupe’s car for a hint of where that confidence comes from, but it is totally empty. No emblems hang from the rearview mirror. No photos or notes are taped to the dashboard. Her face, too, is as impassive as tree bark. Perhaps that is the secret of success, to give nothing away? I glance at my own reflection on the side window. Restless eyes with their whites showing, patches of hectic color on the sloped cheeks, lips which look swollen even though I’m pressing them together, a tight sheen to the skin: forehead, chin, throat, so that it’s hard to swallow. My hair is staticky and out of control around my face. It springs into disobedient curls no matter how often I push it back. If Lupe’s the prudent quail who blends into the brush, I’m the gaudy cockatoo, easy target for any hunter.

  Is that why the men are drawn to me, one after another?

  Book Two

  Remembrance

  and Forgetting

  One day a story will arrive at your town. It will come from far

  away, from the southwest or the southeast-people won’t agree.

  The story may arrive with a stranger or perhaps with

  the parrot trader. But when you hear this story,

  you will know it is the signal….

  —Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

  One

  It is raining. An unseasonable summer rain that darkens the afternoon asphalt of freeways and daubs it with oil slicks in risky rainbow colors. It causes tires to spin and unwary cars to rear-end each other until a huge snarl of traffic blocks the narrow stretch of 880 just past Milpitas. Rain pools in the low, salty flats by the freeway, studded with stunted acacia and looming billboards that announce the advent of a business park. On the other side, the land has already been overcome by the metal tentacles of factories, the huddles of concrete self-storage units to accommodate lives that are on hold. An auto mall is imminent. A shiny nexus of computer companies. It is the year of nostalgia. In a few days 350,000 people will descend upon Saugerties, New York, to celebrate a festival named Woodstock and all it had promised twenty-five years ago. But in this place where geography is reshaped overnight and recalling is less profitable than looking ahead, only the rain holds on to the past, the thick, loamy odor of miles of cabbage fields, now gone. You could pull off the road—just two lanes then—and buy vine-ripened watermelons off the backs of pickup trucks. One year, the body of a schoolgirl was found in the bushes only a hundred yards from here. They say she was killed by two of her classmates.

  Lupe’s car is stuck in the rain with all the others. She glances at her watch. It is hard to decipher, from her face, how deeply the delay is inconveniencing her. How many other women might be waiting for her to take them away from lives that have let them down. She rolls down her window a bit, takes a slim cell phone out of a purse that’s sitting by Sudha’s feet, punches in numbers, speaks to someone in quick, commanding Spanish.

  Sudha, who has been sending her covert glances, hesitates. But finally she asks, “Is it costly, a phone like that?”

  “Yeah,” says Lupe. Her eyes crinkle in faint amusement at my aunt’s attempt to figure her out, to place her economically, if nothing else. “In my line of work, I got to reach people fast—and they got to reach me. Go ahead and crack open your window if you want. I like how the rain smells—though nowadays it doesn’t smell as good as it used to, what with all the chemicals.”

  “Did you grow up in Mexico?” Sudha’s voice is eager. She’s hoping for information, something that will help her understand this enigmatic woman on whom she’s been forced to depend. Something to help her make a connection.

  “Nope. I’m from right here,” Lupe says. “Three generations in San Jose.” She smiles harshly. “But people always ask if I’m Mexican.”

  “Sorry …” Sudha’s voice is abashed. “I didn’t mean …”

  “I know you didn’t. Don’t worry about it.”

  “I want to thank you for helping me. For driving me up all this way. You must be really busy—”

  “De nada.” Lupe’s voice is not unkind, but it discourages further conversation. “It’s all part of the business. You’d better get some rest so that you’re fresh for your interview.”

  Sunil is having lunch with Mr. Sorensen on the exclusive upper floor of the Hennessey, all dim lighting and real crystal and menus which do not list prices. It is an appointment which he’d been prepared to forgo in the crazed grip of passion, though once Sudha made him leave, he drove like a maniac to make sure he w
asn’t late for it. By his flushed face, you can tell he’s excited to be here. Nervous, too, because Mr. Sorensen, the taciturn head of the company’s marketing division, rarely invites any of the staff to have lunch with him. Sunil realizes that this is a rare opportunity, but is not sure what he should do to make the most of it. He watches Mr. Sorensen—the way he consults the menu with just the right amount of disinterest, the way he attracts the attention of the waiter, who is busy on the other side of the crowded room, by flicking a glance in his direction. The thin gold rims of Mr. Sorensen’s glasses give him the benign look of a scholar-ascetic, but this is misleading. As the entire division knows, he has a killer eye for business and can be a terror if one fails to perform. He wears a pale gray suit unrelieved even by pinstripes, at once plainer and more elegant than what the other men in the room are wearing. His silk tie is the epitome of expensive understatement. Only someone like Sunil, who goes on periodic recon missions into the more exclusive stores, would recognize it as a Gucci original. Sunil takes careful mental notes. When Mr. Sorensen tells the waiter he’ll have the salmon special, hold the sauce, and a mixed green salad with oil and vinegar, to be served after the meal, he says he’ll have the same, although like many Indians he has a low opinion of salads, which he terms rabbit food. Like Mr. Sorensen, he orders a Perrier, no ice.

  None of this escapes Mr. Sorensen, who allows a fleeting smile to rise to his lips. It brings an unexpected warmth to his thin face, as though he hasn’t forgotten what it is to be a young man in search of a mentor. His eyes are the exact, glimmering gray of his tie. Sunil, who is speaking to the waiter, misses this. Mr. Sorensen, who came to America as a cabin attendant on the Arctic Queen, who stepped off the ship into a Miami horizon fronded with trees that should only have existed in the Arabian Nights, who made his renegade way across the country until he ended up in San Francisco, has stories he could tell. They hover like glowworms above his head, cautionary tales that Sunil, a renegade himself, would have profited by. But this is not the time for them. And so—like all untold stories—they must allow themselves to be sucked away through the vent into the bowels of the building’s air-conditioning system, to wait there in the drafty, echoing dark, for someone to call them up again.

  Over the salmon, the men discuss Sunil’s clients. Sunil is surprised by how much Mr. Sorensen knows about them, until Mr. Sorensen tells him, in his slight Norwegian accent, that he’s been keeping track of Sunil’s progress over the last year—and is pleased with what he’s seen. The company’s looking for a marketing person to head their new office in Houston, someone with vision, dedication, strong nerves. Is Sunil interested?

  Sunil tries to hide his delight, the way he knows a shrewd businessman should, but already it has leaped into his eyes. Here, finally, is the chance he’s been waiting for—to distinguish himself, to prove that he is what the M.B.A. textbooks term executive material. Along with delight, there’s another emotion. An elated gratitude at this opportunity the gods have bestowed on him so he can start over in a new place with the woman he desires and the child he already loves more than the one he lost. A confirmation, a reward, a proof that what he has done is not wrong.

  “Yes,” says Sunil. He can’t stop himself from adding, “Absolutely.”

  “Maybe you should check at home,” Mr. Sorensen says dryly, “before you commit yourself. Isn’t your wife enrolled in college here?”

  Sunil looks absurdly young in his astonishment. How is it that Mr. Sorensen knows about his wife, when Sunil has taken care never to mention his private life at work? How does a man cultivate such impeccable sources of information? And what else might Mr. Sorensen know? He recovers himself enough to say, “You’re right. I’ll check at home tonight.”

  “Nevertheless, I applaud your enthusiasm,” says Mr. Sorensen, deftly spearing a curly endive leaf onto his fork. “That’s exactly the kind of attitude we’re looking for.” But as he instructs Sunil as to whom he should contact in Human Resources, his eyes are a trifle sad. Perhaps it is because he knows that no matter how far away you move, you cannot escape from what you carry within.

  “Have you seen the new movie at Camera Three?” one of the women in the writers’ group asks Anju as they walk out of class. It’s still raining a little. In the purple-gray light of early evening, the tough, thin leaves of the oleander bushes glisten like the tongues of iguanas. “It’s about Indians. Want to go?”

  Anju stiffens slightly. Movies about Indians, in her experience, are bad news. They force her into elaborate explanations and exhausting denials—often to people she barely knows. No, we don’t eat monkey brains. Or bugs either. Yes, we do worship Goddess Kali, but, no, not usually by sacrificing beautiful virgins. Even movies made by Indian directors, gorgeously artistic, terrifically poignant, and atmospherically accurate, grow problematic in the contextless movie halls of America. Yes, we do have street children. Yes, they really live hard lives. Yes, the police are brutal. Yes, famine happens, and then people starve. Yes, widows are often repressed. Wives also. But there’s a lot more to India than what you’re seeing here. There’s … The questioners nod. They pat Anju’s arm with a familiarity she finds infuriating. It’s as though, in seeing the movie, they’ve gained possession of something of hers that is intimate and shameful. Of course there is, they say, their voices like Hershey’s syrup. Of course there is.

  But maybe the women in the writers’ group, having come from fringes and borderlands, having seen themselves pulled out of shape by the funhouse mirrors of the American imagination, would be different? Maybe with them Anju could talk about how it is when you love parts of your heritage so much that it tingles in your fingertips like pins and needles. You’re ready to kill anyone who criticizes it. And then there are days when things about it make you want to drive your fist through a window.

  “It’s supposed to be a really good movie, entertaining and serious at the same time.”

  “What’s it about?” Anju asks cautiously.

  “It’s about a group of Indian women in England, ordinary women, each with problems of her own, who decide they want to forget it all and enjoy a day at the beach.”

  That’s what she, too, needs, Anju thinks. To forget it all and have a fun day. And the women from the writers’ group, who know and like her just enough that their presence puts no pressure on her (unlike Sudha, she can’t stop herself from thinking), would be perfect companions for this brief oblivion.

  “There’s a show today at six-thirty,” says one of the group. “Shall we, then?”

  “I should go home,” says Anju.

  “It’s just for one evening,” someone says. “Surely you can be late for once? Doesn’t your husband ever come home late?”

  “Leave a message for him,” says another.

  Anju is annoyed at the twinge of guilt she feels. Why shouldn’t she go? Pleasure isn’t illegal, is it? She deserves an evening out with her friends—it’s not like she does it all the time. Sunil will probably work late and not even know that she was gone. And didn’t Sudha herself go out with Lalit all day, just this past weekend? “Okay,” she says. “I’ll call home.”

  She stands inside the phone booth, whose slick plastic walls and low dome make her feel as if she’s been stuffed into a capsule. The walls are covered with furious swirls of gangland graffiti, done in different colors by different hands, presumably at different times. She reads the words, cryptic as code: DNA, Killer Luz, +KTBS+. The calligraphies are oddly similar, as though the graffitans all went to the same school for urban mural design.

  In the apartment the phone rings and rings. Half of her is relieved. She hates to apologize—and she knows that’s what she’ll end up doing if she talks to Sudha. But where has Sudha gone in this rain with Dayita, especially when the child was feverish over the weekend? Anju runs an anxious nail over the reptilian ridges of the metal phone cord. She must be in the basement with the laundry, even though Anju has begged her over and over to wait until she can get home from schoo
l and help her. She lets out a sigh at her cousin’s stubbornness. Things with Sudha have not gone the way she hoped when she invited her to America. She had wanted something else for her cousin. What was it? Something grand, like the arch of a spread-out sky, the one they watched together months back, peopled with those winged women, soaring. But things—people (okay, he)—had gotten in the way. She needs to sit down with Sudha soon, talk to her about her future. (Something practical and concrete, back in India, that would be the best. Perhaps she could find out where Sudha could get a loan? There are co-ops, she’s read recently, in Calcutta and Bombay, where they try to help women who want to own their own businesses.) But not today. She can only fix one life at a time. (There’s an image in her mind as she thinks this; a jewelry box with a broken hinge, a woman’s hand picking up a tiny golden clasp with a pair of tweezers, her steadfast brown fingers.) And she must start with her own.

  She hears the sound of falling water as she enters the house. She looks around. Has someone left a tap on somewhere? Then she sees it. Bas-relief on a slab of greenish slate: a mountain, a tree, fruit shaped like teardrops. Under the tree sits a meditating Buddha, an intricate halo around his head. The whole of it so tiny, she could hold it in her palm. Water flows over it all, pooling into a shallow, rocky basin, then siphoned under to begin its journey again. She puts down the car seat in which her daughter is sleeping and kneels for a closer look. She can’t help it. It’s too beautiful, and she’s been starved of beauty for too long.

  “Do you like my water sculpture?”

  Sudha tilts her head to look at the speaker, a petite redhead with intense blue eyes, her potential employer. Her name, she has just told Sudha, is Myra. She is dressed in a wraparound silk batik skirt, the velvety blossoms on which match her short, crackly hair. “Trideep got it for my last birthday. He knows how much I love Eastern things. The sound of water is so soothing after a day with my clients, so filled with prana energy. Here, sit and relax for a moment while I make us some tea.”