Vine of Desire

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  She disappears down a paneled corridor to the tinkle of silver anklet bells. Sudha sits, as instructed, on the edge of a deep leather chair, her elbows pressed to her body. The chair is so white. Has anyone ever sat in it? She touches the armrest surreptitiously, hungrily, with a single finger. It is clear that this house, all stone and wood and angled upswept ceilings and strategically lighted art objects, fills her with uneasy awe.

  “I’ve never seen a house like this before,” she whispers to Lupe. “It’s so … dramatic. I didn’t even know such things could be done.” She gestures to the ceiling, where an enormous skylight allows in a drizzle of soft gray light.

  “Hmmm,” says Lupe, who is less impressed.

  “It scares me a bit. All these beautiful art pieces. What if Dayita gets her hands on one of them and breaks it? And that water sound—I keep thinking I need to turn something off.”

  “Calm down. It’s just a house. They’re people, just like you and me. Breakable things can be put away.”

  “Thank God Dayita’s still asleep. Otherwise she’d never let me talk properly to the lady. What should I say to her, anyway?”

  “As little as possible.”

  “What if she doesn’t like me? What if she wants someone with experience? I can’t go back to—”

  “We’ll worry about that when it happens. I have a feeling she needs you more than you need her.”

  Sudha gives her a pale, unconvinced smile.

  “Here we are,” Myra says, coming in from the kitchen. She carries, on an elegantly hand-carved wooden tray, ceramic mugs filled with a bright red liquid that looks like no tea Sudha has ever seen.

  “I do hope you like it,” she says. She sets down the tray a bit hard, spilling liquid. “It’s a strengthening tea, made from hibiscus and ginseng. God knows, nowadays I need all the strength I can get.”

  “I’ll pass, thanks,” says Lupe, who has long decided that politeness needs only to extend so far. Sudha takes a sip and suppresses a grimace. Fortunately, Myra has launched into a speech and does not notice.

  “Oh, what a lovely baby! How old is she? Can she walk? Does she talk yet?” Her fingers make little butterfly motions in the air. Why, she’s almost as nervous as Sudha. “We considered having a baby, but finally decided against it. Sometimes I feel it was a selfish decision, but my therapist tells me that that’s an unproductive way of thinking. I’m probably too high-strung to be a good mother, anyway. Not like you. Indian women are so tranquil.”

  Sudha gives Lupe a look. Lupe shrugs. She doesn’t care what delusions employers hold, as long as they treat her women right.

  “Like I was telling you,” Myra continues, playing with her ring, which is ornately carved in Indian gold, “ever since his mother passed away three years ago, Trideep’s been asking his dad to come visit us. The old man kept putting it off. Then finally, this summer, he says okay. Tree’s really excited—me, too, of course. We buy all kinds of Indian groceries, Tree rents a bunch of Bengali videos from Bombay Bazaar. He gets here, everything’s going really well, he likes the neighborhood, goes for walks, even cooks for us. A bit spicy for me, but, still, it’s sweet of him, and I make it a point to tell him how much I appreciate it. Weekends, Tree takes him around—that’s my busiest time, as you can imagine. Did I tell you I’m a Realtor? I work for David Helm. It’s a privately owned company—I couldn’t stand a chain—with offices in San Francisco and Berkeley. We deal only in custom homes. But it’s getting too much for me. The clients are so demanding—that’s the problem with people who have too much money—by the time I get home I have the worst migraines. Tree keeps telling me I should change my field to something calmer, more sattvic and artistic.”

  “You were telling us about the patient,” Lupe says.

  “Right, right. Well, Tree takes his dad everywhere—Napa Valley, up the coast to Mendocino, Hearst Castle. They even fly down to Disneyland one weekend. The dad’s a fun guy, tells us lots of Indian jokes each night at the dinner table. I don’t understand all of them, but we’re having a good time. Then he has a stroke—bam! just like that—which lands him in the hospital.” Myra pauses to catch her breath. “It changes everything.” Her face loses its animation and becomes all hollowed bone. “We bring him home from the hospital, and suddenly he hates everyone, especially me, like it’s all my fault that he can’t move the right side of his body. Like I—”

  “What exactly do you need Sudha to do?” Lupe asks.

  “Just the regular. Bathe him, give him his food and medicines, keep him cheerful. The doctor says a lot of this is mental. People can get better a lot faster if they’re motivated.” Myra puts a hand on Sudha’s arm, appealingly. “That doesn’t sound too tough, does it?”

  “Not at all,” Sudha begins, but Lupe interrupts.

  “What happened to the woman who was here before this?”

  Myra looks unhappy. “I didn’t want to bring that up—you know how it is, negative thoughts create bad energy …”

  Lupe waits, arms folded.

  “She quit after a week,” Myra says, speaking fast. “Said he was too difficult. Not that we can blame him. You’d be cranky, too, if you were stuck in bed all day, wouldn’t you? Anyway, she wasn’t Indian. He’ll probably take to Sudha right away.” She clasps her hands, then unclasps them. When she looks at Sudha, her eyes are wide with worry.

  “About the pay …” says Lupe.

  “Oh, right. I was thinking of a thousand dollars a month….”

  There’s a stunned look on Sudha’s face. There’s a total of thirty dollars in her purse—ten of which she came with, and a twenty that Anju gave her some time back, in case she had to go to the grocery when Anju was at school. That, and a bit of cheap jewelry and her return ticket to India. This would change everything.

  “Uh-uh.” Lupe comes in smoothly before Sudha can speak. “Too little. Wasn’t there something about the old man throwing a TV remote at her? Left a bruise big as a plum on her upper arm.”

  Myra flashes a startled look at Lupe, bites her thumb.

  “I have my sources, you see.” Lupe allows herself a quick, wolfish grin. “Nothing less than twelve hundred.”

  Sudha sucks in her breath at Lupe’s audacity, but, amazingly, Myra agrees. They go on to other details. Sudha is to be paid in cash, Lupe stipulates. Weekly.

  “She’s not going to do any housecleaning, or any cooking—except for the old man. She’s not going to be held responsible for anything the kid breaks. It’s your job to put your valuables away. Anything the old man needs after ten P.M. and before six A.M., you folks have to handle. She gets every Sunday off.”

  Myra assents meekly to everything. They go into the other room so she can pay Lupe her fee. Sudha continues to sit on the edge of the leather chair, dazed at the speed with which things have happened. She has a job, a beautiful house to live in, and an employer who seems hearteningly malleable. Most important of all, for the first time in her life, she has her own money. She’s finally starting her new life in America. The excitement of that, surely, must be coursing through her like a drug. Why, then, does her back slump in a dispirited curve? What makes her grind her knuckles into her eyes? What is it she’s thinking of?

  Only when Lupe comes to say good-bye does she pull herself from her thoughts to catch hold of her hands.

  “You saved my life,” she tells her. Her voice is hoarse, as though after a day of shouting. “I can’t thank you enough—”

  “Hey, hey,” says Lupe, freeing herself. “No big deal. Besides, you shouldn’t thank me yet. You haven’t even started work—you might not like it.”

  “Not like it!” Sudha attempts a smile. “That’d be like a drowning person complaining about the color of the rope thrown to her.”

  Lupe doesn’t comment on this. She tucks in a corner of the sleeping Dayita’s blanket. “Good luck,” she says, putting a hand around Sudha’s shoulders and giving her a surprising half-hug. Then she disappears into the rain, and Sudha is truly on her own.<
br />
  Two

  Sudha

  It is dark, it is raining. I know this is a dream because the rain makes no sound. It merely falls, solid as uncooked spaghetti. Little pieces of it stack up outside a building. No, it’s a room, a room in the night, and the spaghetti rain has reached all the way to the windowsill. The windows are open, some sticks of spaghetti have landed inside, on the carpet colored like dirty foam. They make a crisscross pattern. He sits in the dark in the recliner. He turns the TV on, then off, then on again. O. J. is on the screen, smiling with his hair, speaking with his skin, reaching out with eyes cut out of black cloth.

  She left you, didn’t she, says O. J. They all do. I should know.

  There are squares of light in the room, rectangles of not-light. He unfolds one of the rectangles. It grows into a letter, my letter to him. Or is it my letter to her? He reads it again. He crumples it, he throws it down. He picks it up. She walks in through the door, her mouth makes the shape of questions, she turns on a switch, no answers flood the room. Where is she, she is asking, where is the baby. He is at the window, he holds out the rectangle which is my letter, he holds it aslant into the rain, the words slide off the page, there is blankness, she says, give me the letter, give me the letter, what did you say to her, what did you do, you bastard? She is saying, lost, she is saying, my baby.

  She comes at him with her fists. Light floods the room. Spaghetti shapes whirl outside the window. In my bed I am drowning. I took the coward’s way. He is holding her wrists. She is weeping. It was the only way I had. He is weeping. Words fall from the corners of their eyes. Small and black and shriveled like raisins. We read a poem in school once, what happens to a dream deferred. On the chair next to them is a child’s book I left behind. What happens to a desire deferred? There’s a scratch mark on his cheek in the shape of her nails, bleeding. Stop it, stop. Something balloons inside me, my chest is stretched to bursting. I didn’t know this would happen, he says. He speaks to himself, he speaks to the rain.

  Is this a good time? Is this a bad time? I have no way of knowing. I left the Indian calendar behind, too. The room I’m sleeping in is dark and unfamiliar. If I get down from this bed (too-soft, too-large) I will hit my thigh against furniture I don’t know, in the morning there will be a bruise the shape and color of a half-ripe guava. It will be my fault. It was my fault. A rectangle falls over my face, white as a wedding handkerchief from long ago. The writing on it is thick and black, like spaghetti dipped in recrimination. I think of how the word eka in Bengali can mean both loneliness and being alone.

  Where did she go, all alone?

  Why didn’t she tell me, one of them is saying.

  One of them is saying, It hurts so much I just want to die.

  In sleep my fingers search the bed. Find the small hands, the toes. In sleep my daughter moves away. When she woke from her nap, she called, Baba, Baba. She said, Anju. She would not eat, she would not stop crying. Her face was red and breathless. The woman who hired me pursed up her mouth like a raisin, as though she had made a mistake. I took my daughter into the bedroom, I begged her to be quiet. I rocked her, I sang, I told a story. She would not stop. She tried to throw herself from my arms. I slapped her. In our sleep, the rain has hard fingers.

  One of them thinks, I did a terrible thing.

  One of them thinks, It must have been really terrible, what you did.

  The woman knocked on the door and said, Give her to me for a little bit. I am a bad mother, wherever I go. There was a purplish blotch on Dayita’s cheek. When the woman took me in to see the old man, his eyes were like burning raisins. Go away, he said. He took his left hand, his right doesn’t move, and pushed the dinner tray off the bed. His eyes were black and plump with hate. Get out of my sight. There was spaghetti all over the floor, red and white swirls like painted peonies. His fingers bent inward, like claws.

  She shouldn’t have done it, O. J. says sadly. I shouldn’t have done it.

  One of us says, I got it all wrong.

  Is this my skin I’m touching now, is this my daughter’s skin? Is it a handkerchief, a letter cut from black cloth? The rain shuffles like an old man’s shoes. Before I lay down, I pushed the dresser against the door, then felt foolish. She said, I’m sorry, he’s tired, things will be better tomorrow. She said, Let me help you clean up the spaghetti. He said, Vultures, bitches, leave me alone. He used Bengali words, too. Daini. Magi. Once in childhood, I walked into a field of sugarcane and got lost. There were leaves all around me, their sharp, sawtoothed edges. She said, This makes it three days he hasn’t eaten. Shit, what am I going to do. He said, Whores. The smell of the cane was ripe and musky, too sweet. I couldn’t breathe. There was no end to the field, to the leaves whispering, eka, eka.

  Anju, I don’t even know how deep it goes, the harm I’ve done.

  You don’t know which way to turn, says O. J., to climb out of loneliness. So you turn whichever way you can.

  I said to my daughter, I’m sorry. The woman was crying. See what I have to put up with. I’m going to have a nervous breakdown. Her face was creased with things she wanted to shout out, like a flower squeezed in a sweaty fist. My husband, he’s never there when I need him. My daughter turned her face away, with a look. My daughter scooted her small body to the far end of the bed.

  She says, What will happen to us now?

  What will happen to us now? he replies.

  Three

  The earth turns, hemisphere of darkness, hemisphere of light. Winds shift, herding clouds ahead of them. In Calcutta, Ashok sits down to write another letter. In America, on a pillow dampened by fever or rage, a half-paralyzed old man dreams of flight. Their bodies flung onto separate, disparate beds, Sunil and Anju chase shadows in their sleep: silhouettes of regret, arabesques of what might have been. Stumbling to the bathroom with a tension headache, Myra counts out drops of feverfew into a tumbler of warm water. Two A.M. Three. Lalit follows a lone eighteen-wheeler on Freeway 280, on his way home from an emergency at the hospital. Over the hills at Skyline, strips of mist like torn membranes. He turns the radio from a talk show where a woman claims she was visited by Nicole’s spirit to an oldies station. Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone. In her sleep, Dayita’s body loosens and turns toward her mother’s. In her sleep, Sudha puts an arm around her and draws her close.

  The sun rises like a blood orange over Grizzly Peak, supremely confident, as though the rain had never been. Dewdrops glitter in the redwood that fringes Sudha’s window. The window is a huge sheet of plateglass, uncurtained. A jay preens its feathers, sassy-blue in the brilliant morning. It is the year of aggressive movements; a man named Saddam is mobilizing sixty thousand soldiers and seven hundred tanks, which will result in a reciprocal mobilization by the U.S. Army. If she were to walk to the window, Sudha would see the town of Berkeley unscrolled below her, its quirkily angled rooftops slanting down the hillside, its riotous tumbles of bougainvillea and trumpet vine and passion flower where the last of the deer feed in the evenings. Down farther, the square red-tiled buildings of the university, its narrow dorms and sprawling co-ops where students stay up nights to study and argue and get drunk and fall in and out of love, believing all the while that they are the inheritors of the world. Then the Berkeley Bowl, from which Myra buys organic oats, pesticide-free sorrel, soy cheese from Japan. The high school with its metal detectors, flanked on one side by a chain-link fence and on the other by a mural filled with faces like dark, busy rainbows. In People’s Park, the homeless stir stiffly in sleeping bags lined with newspapers. A woman in Birkenstocks sweeps the sidewalk in front of the cafés of Telegraph Avenue, empty at this hour and a little sad. The roads crisscross like old shoelaces, leading us finally to the pier, that gray cement pencil pointing into the water as though it contained the solution for our landlocked lives.

  But Sudha doesn’t walk to the window. She lies on her side, unmoving, her knees drawn up to her chest as though she were cold. She keeps her eyes closed, though from her un
even breathing it’s clear she’s awake. She is contemplating interior spaces, the vistas she has left behind. Last night, brushing her teeth, she spoke to the mirror: I will not think of the past. I will not think. Of. The past. But now, again, she feels it: the press of a man’s lips on her soul.

  The room they have given her is beautiful, decorated with care and an unerring eye. Could the nervous Myra be capable of such grace? The north wall is hung with an abstract weaving in warm browns, with pieces of bleached driftwood worked in. The south wall, behind her head, holds a framed Indian miniature painting in jewel colors, a flute-playing Krishna positioned, unexpectedly, between two dancing lions. To the east is an alcove with recessed lighting. In it sits a many-armed goddess with a bronze scowl and a trident. The room is sparely furnished: bed, dresser, leather armchair, tall brass reading lamp. This decorator—whoever she is—does not believe in clutter. The rug on the floor is Native American, its clean lines depicting triangular human figures, the sun and moon, animals with inquiring, coyote snouts. The quilt is a geometric design in shades of cream and henna red, silk squares over which Sudha, her eyes still closed, slides a slow, appreciative hand.

  But now the alarm clock by the bed rings, and Sudha must prepare to meet her future. She pulls her jeans and a sweatshirt from the large walk-in closet where she hung her embarrassingly few clothes last night. In the bathroom, Grohe faucets in gleaming silver arcs, English Lavender Gel in the ceramic dispenser, two thick Turkish towels, white as a pirate’s grin. She shucks off her nightdress carelessly. Take a shower, very hot. Wash the last traces of him from your body. Bundle the hair into a knot, don’t bother to comb out tangles, there’s no one here to see, thank God. Along with gratitude, why does she feel a sense of loss so absolute it makes her dizzy? He had cupped his hands for me, so I could pour all my loneliness into them. On a glass shelf, bottles of lotion present their labels to her. Claiborne Sport for men guests, Victoria’s Secret Garden for women. She who is not a guest (is she more? is she less?) lifts a tube, bangs it back down with severity. Let the skin crack and peel. That will be your penance for opening yourself to desire.