Duty and Desire

by Anju Gattani

  Chapter Four

  Mirage

  The warmth of the night closed in upon Sheetal. She whimpered and tossed…

  Barefoot and seated cross-legged, she turned her face away from the heat of the agni, the religious fire, burning in a square metal havan on the carpeted ground three feet away. Flames blew in her direction, their tongues reaching, beckoning her closer. She had to get out of there before the fire consumed her. She reeled right and bumped a man who also sat in a lotus-like position.

  “Excuse me,” she blurted, “I—” the statement caught in her throat.

  Embroidery and gemstones adorned the full-sleeve shirt of this gentleman’s bronze sherwani. The hem of his shirt touched the knees of his tightly fit, tapered trousers. Despite his expensive clothing, uneasiness caused her to draw back. Curious, she leaned forward and tried to glimpse his face, but a curtain of tiny white mogra flowers, tied to a cord around his forehead, shielded his face.

  Ninety degrees to the stranger’s right, Mama and Papa—Rana and Indu Prasad—sat in the same austere fashion. They, too, wore costly clothing. Behind them, uncles, aunts and cousins sat on the rug dressed in brightly colored chiffon, silk and organza saris, heavy jewelry, and dark suits with bright ties. Whose wedding was this?

  Everyone’s attention remained focused on the havan. Clouds of gray smoke billowed toward the twenty-by-twenty-feet canopy of yellow silk and escaped out the open sides into the star-studded sky. The silk ceiling dipped several inches on all sides under the weight of tiny pearls and small ingots of gold. Four pillars held up the canopy, and seven matkis—earthenware pots—of decreasing size, stacked one atop another, leaned against each pillar.

  Two Hindu pundits, dressed in yellow and saffron-colored robes, sat cross-legged to the left of the fire. The priests poured ladles of ghee into the havan while chanting religious shlokas.

  A fireball spiraled up from the havan. Its heat caught Sheetal in the face. Soot irritated her lungs and grated her eyes. Her stomach cramped. The canopy was bound to catch fire.

  The pundits’ sonorous chants blended as they fed more ghee and dry grains of rice into the havan. Sheetal leaned aside and coughed as beads of sweat oozed down her neck and back and gathered at the curve of her waist, dampening the throttling stitches of her outfit.

  Another billow of smoke spiraled. Sheetal turned her head away and tried again to catch a glimpse of the stranger seated beside her. Her failed attempt incited murmurs of disapproval from other guests. She looked at her father for an explanation, but his attention remained fixed on the havan.

  Unable to bear the heat, she rose to leave, but the stranger grabbed her right hand and forced her down. She tried to wrench free, but he tightened his ice-cold grip, causing the curtain of flowers masking his face to swing like windshield wipers. Sheetal flattened her left palm on the rug in preparation to inch away from the flames, but the crush of people seated behind her prevented escape.

  Suddenly, someone yanked her left hand behind her and ran their fingers up and down the rungs of her bangles. Sheetal twisted to see who held her.

  “Just lovely!” cried the girl who held her wrist. “And ooh…look at her hathphools! Bet they cost a fortune.”

  The girl examined the four rings on each of Sheetal’s henna-laced fingers, each ring linked by golden chains to a bracelet. She traced a finger up the red henna designs that crawled from Sheetal’s fingertips to halfway up her elbows in spirals of thorns and creepers.

  Sheetal tried to free her hands, but her dupatta’s sharp zardozi embroidery pricked her cheeks, and the sway of her heavy earrings tugged at her earlobes. She managed to yank both hands free.

  The stranger tossed grains of puffed rice into the havan, causing the fire to leap in a scorching frenzy and devour the food. A pundit placed a few grains of puffed rice on Sheetal’s right palm and ordered her to do the same. Sheetal stiffened. She didn’t want to. But Papa’s pointed scowl meant, Do as you’re told. She reached to toss the rice into the fire but the grains fell near her foot. Sheetal pulled her knees to her chest and hugged her legs, not daring to meet Papa’s gaze.

  The other pundit ordered Sheetal and the stranger to their feet. The thick choker around Sheetal’s neck tightened. She tugged at the choker. Papa smiled, like he’d been waiting for this moment. She had to run away. Not because of the fire. Because of him. This stranger. His stare drilled into her through the windshield of flowers and caused her to squirm.

  This had to be a dream. Sheetal opened her mouth to say so, but smoke choked her and clouded her vision. Then she glimpsed her reflection in a brass vase that leaned against a matki. This wasn’t just any wedding. She was the bride! And she was marrying this stranger. She raised her right hand to signal Mama for help, but the stranger seized her wrist and forced her to rise.

  A pundit tied the sash draping her left shoulder to the stole hanging from the groom’s shoulder and ordered her to lead the first six of seven sacred perambulations around the havan.

  Sheetal crushed the carpet under her toes, the weight of her golden anklets weighing each step. The skirt of her richly embroidered red ghagra, complete with matching blouse and sash, noosed her in its cocoon. She inched forward and the ghagra dragged behind in a blood-river of red silk.

  A dream. This had to be a dream.

  After completing six of the seven pheras, Sheetal brushed past the groom and glimpsed his face through the slits of mogra flowers before taking her place behind him. Her heart pounded. Had that really been a pair of empty sockets where his eyes should have been?

  A dream, she reassured herself.

  One last phera would render the marriage complete. Clouds of soot billowed under the canopy and smothered the air. She should run. But where to? He glided forward and she followed. Halfway around the fire, inches away from being bound to this devil for a lifetime…

  It’s now or never.

  Sheetal clutched the sides of her ghagra and stepped into the fire. A thousand needles stabbed her feet. Ash rose like a volcano as flames engulfed spirals of embroidery and red fabric. She gasped, but smoke filled her lungs and she coughed. Someone yanked her arm, but she resisted the pull to safety.

  “Sheetal!” Mama’s screams soared above the ocean of panic-stricken screams. Mama reached out to grab Sheetal’s hand but recoiled from the flames.

  A vortex of heat spiraled up Sheetal’s gut. She screamed as flames danced on her hand, leaping to the hathphools, mehndi, and gold bangles.

  This couldn’t be happening. But it was real. She was burning. She was on fire. She was fire.

  “Bachao! Bachao!” Rana Prasad yelled as men ran back and forth and women lunged to cover the eyes of children.

  No one could save what was beyond help.

  Chapter Five

  Drizzling Diamonds

  “Sheetal… Sheetal?”

  Under the bed covers, Sheetal sluggishly ran her fingers down her satin nightgown. Today was her wedding day. She let her hand fall back to her side.

  “When you grow up, you will marry a prince, a Rajkumar,” Mama once proclaimed. “And that will make you happy. Very, very happy.”

  Other childhood images flooded her mind. How she loved to stretch out her arms and spin on her toes under the rotating ceiling fan as her white dress flared and strands of her silky, waist-length hair flew around her face like a dark cloud.

  Mama would clap in time to the music playing on their imported Sony stereo cassette player as rungs of colorful glass and gold bangles jingled to long, melodious notes of the harmonium and sitar. The sari pallu around Mama’s head always slipped, revealing a river of vermilion sindoor running down her hair’s middle parting. Mama was quick to pull the pallu back over her head out of respect, inevitably hiding the mark of a married woman, should Asha, her mother-in-law, suddenly walk in. Then Mama threw back her head and laughed, her diamond nose-pin sparkling in the sunlight against her milky-white complexion. No one was more beaut
iful than Mama. Not even Sheetal, who didn’t inherit Mama’s fine-cut features, hair that curled naturally, or the milky-white complexion that was every Indian woman’s dream.

  “Louder! Louder!” Sheetal called.

  Mama fiddled with the knob on the stereo until music engulfed the room, creating a bubble-like universe no one could burst. The fan, walls and carpeted floor blurred in Sheetal’s vision and the white of her dress was all she could see. She collapsed in Mama’s arms and the two giggled, their laughter reverberating beneath the fan.

  “You’re going to make everyone in your mahal dizzy with all that spinning.” Mama pulled Sheetal close to her chest and the thump of her heartbeat filled Sheetal’s ears.

  “I don’t have a palace.”

  “You will, my darling. When you’re all grown up.”

  “Will I be like you?” No one was more loving or more caring than Mama.

  “You will be better than me.”

  Sheetal jumped up, stretched her arms out and spun in circles all over again. “You! I want to be just like you.”

  Now, thirteen years later, at the age of twenty-two, Sheetal didn’t want to be like Mama. She didn’t want the boredom of Mama’s married life, which had been arranged thirty years ago by some middleman who knew both families and concluded that Mama would be a perfect fit for Rana Prasad. She wanted the dizzy euphoric rapture of being in love. Of meeting the man of her dreams, like so many women did in romance novels and Bollywood films. She wanted a man to woo her, to pursue her in gentle ways and say ‘I love you’ until she said it back. Arvind had fulfilled all those wishes. Arvind was everything she could ask for in a man. But Mama would have none of that.

  “Sheetal? Come now. Wake up,” Mama’s voice blended with the outside coo of the koyal birds and the chirp of sparrows.

  Usually, Sheetal wouldn’t have minded waking. Today, however, she wanted to curl into a ball beneath the sheets and pretend the day didn’t exist. She rolled onto her side and raised the sheet over her exposed ear.

  The mattress dipped near her pillow, causing her body to tilt. Loose wisps of hair were brushed away from her face and she opened her eyes.

  “It’s your wedding day!” Mama sang in Hindi. “The whole house is buzzing. Can you believe this special day is finally here?”

  Sheetal’s head throbbed. She pulled down the covers. “I had a bad dream, Mama. This marriage isn’t right.”

  “It is,” Mama was firm. “And don’t give me the nose. You’re just having butterflies. There’s so much happening. You’re nervous. Worried. It’s perfectly fine to feel—”

  “I’m serious, Mama.”

  Mama wrapped Sheetal’s fingers in the palms of her pashmina-like hands as a summer breeze from the open balcony door carried the scent of jasmines, roses and chrysanthemums into the room. “I know how you feel. Like there’s too much going on at once. But trust me. Everything will go perfectly as planned.”

  “I hate him.”

  “You will learn to love him over time.”

  “Love isn’t”—Sheetal faltered for the right word—“automatic. You can’t just water it like grass and expect it to grow. You and Papa had to marry whomever your parents chose for you, but I don’t. Times have changed. A woman can—”

  Mama pulled Sheetal to her chest. “You must calm down, my darling. This kind of temper at your in-laws’ just won’t do. Even though that dimple on your cheek makes you look so beautiful. Perfect. Well…almost perfect.” She teasingly pinched Sheetal’s nose.

  Sheetal gritted her teeth.

  “You will be a wonderful wife. And soon, an equally good mother. But how will I carry on without you?” Mama rocked Sheetal in her arms, counting each year gone by with a string of kisses on her head. The fragrance of lily joss sticks meant Mama had probably come up from her morning prayers.

  Nineteen…twenty…twenty-one—

  Sheetal waited for one last kiss to mark her twenty-second year, but none came. Or maybe she just didn’t feel it. She flexed the fingers of her right hand. The engagement ring obstructed her movement.

  “Look at how special you are.”

  There it was again, the how-special-you-are line.

  “Every inch… Brahma has truly created you.”

  Her head pounded. She was sick and tired of being special, of being told she was Brahma’s one perfect creation. She pulled away and looked past the pink and yellow sari pallu covering Mama’s head to the wall clock behind. She had fourteen hours to end this wedding nonsense. “I’m not doing this.”

  “You are not like other girls. Remember, we’re doing what’s best for you.”

  Women of Mama’s generation believed that a daughter’s real home was the husband’s home, and until she married, she was a liability for her parents. Did Mama see her that way? No. It’s just that this alliance offered her parents an opportunity to maintain their hard-earned prestige and secure it for life by marrying her into the elite class.

  Technically, the dowry was hers to keep even though it was directed to the in-laws. Her only way out was to go through with this marriage, convert the dowry into cash and then contact Arvind. They could use the money to buy a flat in a decent locale, furnish it with basic necessities, find jobs, and life wouldn’t be as miserable as Kavita and Gaurav’s. Still, the thought of marrying someone else clawed at her heart and tears stung her eyes. How could she go through with this? “You don’t know what’s best for me.” Sheetal’s chest tightened. “Just because you raised me doesn’t give you or Papa the right to—”

  A sharp sting blasted across her right cheek, and Mama retracted her hand. “Look what you made me do, all because of that Arvind. He’s not worth any of this. Forget him.”

  Sheetal closed her eyes to hold back tears, her face burning.

  “If anything goes wrong today,” Mama warned, “it’s your fault.” Then she turned to leave.

  Sheetal clenched her fists. “I hate Rakesh. I will always hate that Rakesh.”

  Mama headed for the door.

  Didn’t Mama hear?

  Mama paused, one hand on the doorknob. “I’ll send Preeti up shortly.” Mama kept her back to Sheetal. “She’ll help you get dressed and escort you downstairs. We are waiting.”

  ***

  For the next ten minutes, Sheetal paced her room. She could run away. And go where? What would the scandal do to Mama and Papa? What about the caterers, decorators, engineers, and technicians who had worked for a whole week? And family, friends and families of friends who had flown across India and overseas for the occasion?

  A knock at the door intruded upon her thoughts. Sheetal flopped onto the bed. It was useless. There was no escape.

  “Sahiba?” Preeti called.

  Sheetal turned her head toward the door and took a deep breath. A summer breeze swept across the room, drumming the fabric of Sheetal’s nightgown against her curves and causing the scent of lavender, from the bed sheets, to fill the air. The scent usually soothed Sheetal’s nerves, but nothing could ease the present tension.

  “Sahiba?”

  “Come in,” Sheetal answered.

  Preeti entered, dressed in one of Sheetal’s hand-me-down salwar suits. She beamed from ear to ear. “Memsahib say help you get ready. So many people waiting downstairs,” the pitch of her voice rose in excitement as she crossed the room. “Man with big light. Holding big camera.” She pronounced it ‘kamraa’ because English, for Preeti, was a foreign language, as it was for many locals.

  “How many people?” Sheetal asked.

  “Fifty…sixty…maybe one hundred.”

  Sheetal rolled onto her side, turning her back to Preeti.

  “I see your mehndi?” Preeti referred to the henna latticework running from the tips of Sheetal’s fingers to her elbows. Preeti lifted Sheetal’s wrist. “Look at color. Very red. You know, Sahiba, it meaning?”

  Preeti traced doodles on Sheetal’s hand, which reminded Sheetal of th
e gentle brush of Arvind’s fingers. If Papa’s business hadn’t succeeded, she could have been in Preeti’s shoes. She pulled away from her hold.

  “It means your husband love you lots. Other one…other one…show. Show!”

  “Really, Preeti.” Sheetal sat up, annoyed at the girl’s begging. Here she was trying to figure a way out and all Preeti wanted was to decode the color of her mehndi.

  “Sahiba, please open fingers. It so-o-o beautiful. So red. Think how pretty you look with all your jewelry on.”

  Sheetal left the bed, crossed to her cupboard, opened its door and flipped through her clothes. “Here we are.” She pulled a silver hanger off the rod and swiveled the floral-printed, pink-and-cream salwar suit she had worn to the Broken Fort. It was easier to get rid of it than try to explain how the dupatta had ripped if Mama came across it later.

  “Oh, Sahiba! It…it beautiful,” Preeti said. “You take this?”

  “No.” Sheetal yanked another hanger off the rod, which held the matching trousers and dupatta, the tear hidden between its folds. “It’s not new, but it’s one of my favorites. And I want you to have it. There’s a little tear in the dupatta. No need to tell Mama about it.”

  Preeti raised her hands to her mouth in awe. “Oh, Sahiba.”

  “Think of it as a goodbye gift.” Sheetal folded the salwar suit, pulled open a dressing table drawer, located a yellow plastic bag and stuffed the attire in. Then she dropped the bag on the floor near the dresser. “Remember to take it with you when you go home.”

  “Sahiba?”

  “Mmm?”

  “After you go, this still your room?”

  Sheetal knotted her waist-length hair into a make-do bun. “Nothing will change after I go. Mama promised to keep everything as it is.”

  “Your board?” Preeti pointed to a corner of the room.