Arranged Marriage: Stories

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  “Bhavi, bhavi, where are you? Have I got great news for you!”

  Preeti put her pillow over her head, willing him away like she tried to do with the dull, throbbing headaches that came to her so often nowadays. But he was at the bedroom door, knocking.

  “Open up, bhavi! I have something to show you—I aced the Math final—I was the only one in the entire class….”

  “Not now, Raj, please, I’m very tired. Dinner’s in the kitchen—do you think you could help yourself?”

  “What’s wrong? You have a headache? Wait a minute, I’ll bring you some of my tiger balm—excellent for headaches.”

  She heard his footsteps recede, then return.

  “Thanks, Raj,” she called out to forestall any more conversation. “Just leave it outside. I don’t feel like getting up for it right now.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to get up. I’ll bring it in to you.” And before she could refuse, Raj had opened the door—how could she have forgotten to lock it?—and walked in.

  Shocked, speechless, Preeti watched Raj. Holding a squat green bottle in his extended hand, he seemed to advance in slow motion across the suddenly enormous expanse of the bedroom that had been her last sanctuary. His lips moved, but she couldn’t hear him through the red haze that was spreading across her eyes.

  A voice pierced the haze, screaming at him to get out, get out right now. A hand snatched the bottle and hurled it against the wall where it shattered and fell in emerald fragments. Dimly she recognized the voice, the hand. They were hers. And then she was alone in the sudden silence.

  The bedroom was as neat and tranquil as ever when Deepak walked in. Only a very keen eye would have noted the pale stain against the far wall.

  “Are you OK? Raju mentioned something about you not feeling well.” And then, as his glance fell on the packed suitcase by which Preeti was standing, “What’s this?”

  “I’m leaving,” she said, her voice very calm. “I’m going to move in for a while with Cathy….”

  She watched, eyes expressionless, as Deepak swore softly and violently.

  “You can’t leave. What would people say? Besides, you’re my wife. You belong in my home.”

  She looked at him a long moment. Somewhere in the back of her mind was a thought. Mother, you were right. Oddly, it caused her no sorrow.

  “It’s Raju, isn’t it? You just can’t stand him, can you, although he’s tried and tried, poor fellow.” Deepak’s voice was bitter. “Very well, I’ll get him out of your way. For good.”

  She listened silently to his footsteps fading down the stairs. A long, low murmur of voices came from the living room. Then she heard sounds of packing from the guest room. She realized that she was still standing and moved to sit on the bed. Her limbs felt stiff and wooden, and she had trouble bending her knees. Sometime later—she couldn’t tell how much—from outside her bedroom door, Raj thanked her and wished her luck in the hushed voice people reserve for the very ill. The front door banged behind the men.

  She was still sitting on the bed when Deepak returned and told her that Raj would be staying at a motel till he found a room on campus.

  “Hope you’re happy, now that you have the house all to yourself,” he ended acidly. And then, “I’m going to sleep in the guest room.”

  From the master bedroom, Preeti could hear his awkward bed-making efforts, the muffled sound of pillows thrown on the floor, the creaking bedsprings. A part of her cried out to go to him, to apologize and offer to have Raj back. To fashion her curves to his warm body and let his lips—so familiar, so reassuring—soothe her into sleep.

  Instead, for the first time, she lay down alone in the big bed they’d bought together the week before their marriage. She closed her eyes and tried to recall the happiness of that day, but there was only a black square filled with snow and static, as when, while watching a video, one comes across a portion of the tape that has been erased by accident. She lay there, feeling the night cover her slowly, layer by cold, clean layer. And when the door finally clicked shut, she did not know whether it was in the guest room or deep inside her own being.

  THE

  ULTRASOUND

  MY COUSIN ARUNDHATI AND I ARE BOTH PREGNANT WITH our first babies, a fact which gives me great pleasure. Although she’s in India and I’m here in California, we’ve kept close track of each other’s progress. Each week we compare notes on the nausea (I have it worse than Runu, not just in the morning but through the entire day), the crippling sleepiness of the early afternoon (particularly hard on Runu since that’s when she has to fix tea snacks for her in-laws), the depressing weight gain (we have no waists at all); the exhilarating sense of unrealness which makes us write, at the end of each letter, “Is this truly happening?”

  We keep in touch mostly through letters. International calls are too expensive for my slender budget, since I’m still in school and there isn’t much left of Sunil’s salary after he sends money home to his parents. Still, once in a while, for a special occasion, I’ll phone. Runu and I plan these calls for months in advance. Sometimes the night before I he in the dark, too excited to sleep, and think of the moment when I’ll hear Runu’s voice with its dear, familiar breathlessness, as though she’s run all the way to the phone.

  Next week is one of those special times. Because that’s when (we planned it this way, changing my date to match the one her mother-in-law arranged for her) we get the results of our amniocentesis tests.

  “Just one more day now for the results!” I fold my knitting, an impossibly tiny red sweater, and smile up at Sunil, who has just walked in. He sets his briefcase down and leans over the recliner to give me a hug.

  “Are you nervous, Anju?” he asks. There’s a history of birth defects in my family—just one or two, but it’s enough to worry us.

  “Not really. Well, maybe a bit. Actually I was thinking of Runu. It’ll be so nice to talk to her again, to find out how she’s doing. To know if she’s having a boy or a girl. That way we can plan matching names….”

  Sunil scowls. “I don’t know why you have to be the one to call every time.”

  “Now don’t be mean! You know Runu would call if she could. But her mother-in-law doesn’t believe in spending money on long-distance calls. She doesn’t even let Runu call her mother in Calcutta….”

  “Why can’t you just write?” mutters Sunil as he heads for the kitchen. Above the clang of lids, I hear him say, “It’s not as though we’re millionaires.” In my prepregnancy days he would have scolded me, his voice sharp with justified anger, while I lowered my eyes and picked guiltily at the border of my sari. Is that why I’m killing myself sweating from dawn to dusk so you can fritter the money away? But now he lets the matter drop.

  Sometimes I suspect that Sunil is jealous of Runu. Perhaps it’s because we go so far back together, to the time when we were both seven and Pratima-auntie, Runu’s widowed mother, moved to the apartment behind our house in Calcutta soon after my own father died. Perhaps it’s the memories we share, which Sunil can never feel as we do no matter how carefully I paint them for him. Perhaps he guesses, though I’m careful not to give him cause, that in some ways she’s still the most important person in my life.

  Runu’s due date and mine are within a week of each other, in about five months. I wasn’t really surprised, though, when I called Calcutta to tell her about my baby and she, laughing—but a little shyly, as though someone were close by, listening—replied that she too had some good news for me. Because for as long as I can remember, we’ve always done everything together.

  In grade school we would race each other to the bus stop, identical gray uniform skirts slapping against identical knobby knees, our vapor-breath mingling in the cold morning air. The loser had to buy panipuris for us both from the street vendor who stood outside the school gates each afternoon. (Sometimes I lost on purpose, because Runu never had much pocket money. But I had to be careful about it because she had a lot of pride.) We would gulp down the crisp spi
cy rounds filled with sweet and sour potatoes, glancing around to make sure no one who knew our parents was around. (Both our mothers were convinced that eating street food would give us the most horrible diseases.) Then, after inspecting each other’s mouths carefully to make sure no telltale traces remained, we would make our way home, united further by our act of wickedness.

  Later we would play truant together and go to the movies. (We both liked the same kind, historical romances where turbanned heroes on horseback rescued damsels with pouting rosebud mouths, wearing jeweled saris.) On our way to college we would discuss boys. That Suresh in History class, with the crooked smile, wasn’t he a heartbreaker? And that one, the one with the thick sideburns whose name we didn’t know, who always waited at the same bus stop and sometimes (oh shocking) winked at us. What would we do if he actually approached us, asked us to meet him at the coffee house or at the Rabindra Sarobar lake? But all the while we knew it was just talk, because after graduation, like good Indian girls, we both allowed our mothers to arrange traditional marriages for us. The only thing we insisted on was a double wedding.

  I’m not saying there weren’t differences. Money for one. When my father died, Mother had taken over the family business, a bookstore in a prime College Street location, and surprised everyone by managing it with shrewd efficiency. Runu’s father, dying after a long illness, had left only debts behind, and Pratima-auntie, like most genteel Bengali widows, was always struggling to make ends meet. Runu never had new dresses and shoes like me, or large plush teddy bears or wind up dolls from America that could dance and say hello. Or, later, silk saris or gold earrings with matching bracelets for her birthdays. But she wouldn’t let me give her any of my things, even though it would have made me happy, and after a few fights I stopped trying.

  Somehow she never did as well academically either, though I believed she was quite as intelligent as I was. Encouraged by my mother to be competitive, I went on to win spelling bees and debate contests, and later in college to grapple with Chaucer and Thomas Hardy and W. B. Yeats in my English Honors classes. I browsed through our bookstore and the USIS library, reading Hemingway and Kerouac and Willa Cather and longing to visit the places they wrote of. Runu took up Home Science, which everyone admitted was the major that the dullest girls chose. She seemed to enjoy it, though, all that knitting and crocheting and cooking that would have driven me crazy. She would turn out elaborate dishes like biriyani and patisapta that took days to prepare. When I carelessly tore my sari borders, she would mend them with stitches so tiny they were almost invisible. And she made the best mango chutney I ever tasted.

  So maybe it’s fitting that Prajapati, the winged and capricious god of marriage, set us down in such different places—me here in San Jose with Sunil, and her in provincial Burdwan, the eldest daughter-in-law of a large, traditional brahmin family.

  My feet are really swollen today. Again. My legs look puffy, boneless, like flesh-colored nylons stuffed to bursting. When I press down on my shins with my thumbs, they form oval, purple-tinged hollows that refuse to disappear. Nothing hurts, though, because it’s all numb.

  When Sunil comes home from work he takes one look at my legs and makes me lie down on the couch with my feet up. He massages them with pine oil until a little feeling comes back into them. I take in a deep breath of the strong pungent odor I’ve come to love and smile at him. “I feel much better,” I say, and really I do.

  Sunil smiles back and leans over to kiss my stomach lightly. “How’s Peace-and-Joy?” he asks.

  “Fine,” I reply.

  This is our little private joke. If we have a son, we’re going to call him Anand, which means joy in Bengali. If we have a daughter, her name will be Shanti, peace. Until the amnio results reveal the baby’s sex, we call him (her) Peace-and-Joy.

  “Will you be just as happy if it’s a girl?” I ask Sunil, my voice trembling a bit though I try to control it. This is a conversation we’ve had many times before.

  “Of course, silly,” he replies patiently, smoothing my hair.

  “And your parents …?”

  “They will too. And even if they’re not at first, they’ll get over it. So stop worrying!”

  Then we’re both silent, thinking about the other thing, the one we don’t talk about. What we would do if something turned out to be wrong with the baby. I think of the drooling boy with albino eyes who used to be kept hidden in a small room in the dark and crumbly Calcutta mansion where an other aunt lived. I’d come across him by accident one afternoon, exploring the forbidden parts of the house while the grown-ups were drinking tea downstairs. I hear again the grunting sounds he’d made, see his fingers beckoning to me from between the iron grills of his window, soft and fat and a pale pinkish-brown, like earthworms. No one ever told me what happened to him. I slip my hand into Sunil’s and he grips it tightly. We sit like this until night darkens the room.

  Sometimes when I’m dressing, I glance up at the mirror and am surprised once again by the changes—the dark line of hair pointing downward from my navel, the nipples dark and glistening as the prunes I soak in water overnight for my constipation, the pearlike swell of abdomen and breast, at once luscious and obscene. I cannot decide if I am gorgeous or revolting. I wonder what Runu looks like. I don’t have any recent photos of her. I guess her mother-in-law doesn’t believe in taking photos either.

  The last time I saw Runu was a month before I came to America. I had gone down to Burdwan to visit her in the big brick and marble mansion in which her husband’s family had lived, her mother-in-law proudly informed me, for seven generations. Was there just a hint, in her voice, of how lucky Runu was to be chosen into such a household?

  Runu had been waiting for me just behind the front door, in the looming shadow of the heavy teak panel carved with fierce-looking house gods, yakshas and yakshinis. (It wasn’t fitting that the bride of the Bhattacharjee family should come to the station where common people could stare at her.) Her eyes sparkled as she threw herself into my arms, repeating over and over how delighted she was to see me, how wonderful I looked, just like on our marriage day (which was the last time we’d seen each other), and how much she had to tell me.

  I was about to say that she too seemed exactly the same. The wedding sindur on her forehead and the red-bordered sari wrapped around her slight, girlish form only made her look like she was playing at being a grown-up. But right then Runu’s mother-in-law called from the kitchen, her voice pleasant but firm, “Arundhati, are you coming to roll out the rotis?”

  “Coming, Mother,” Runu answered. Turning to me apologetically, she said, “Why don’t you rest for a while, Anju dear?” As I stared at her back disappearing hurriedly down a corridor, I realized that many things had changed.

  Next afternoon we sat in the backyard, under the shadow of an old neem tree, Runu sewing buttons onto a pair of pants that belonged to one of her brothers-in-law. There were three of them. I’d met them at dinner last night. And though they’d been properly respectful, calling her boudi, older sister-in-law, and complimenting her on her new fish kalia recipe, I’d felt a pinprick of anger as I watched Runu serve them and clean up their spills and remove their dirty dishes with a smile that never faltered.

  “Don’t you get bored when your husband is gone?” I asked. Runu’s husband Ramesh worked for Indian Railways and had to travel several weeks out of the month.

  “Oh no! There’s always so much to be done! Early in the morning I have to supervise the maid as she milks the cows. Then I make tea for Mother, she’s very particular, I have to get it just the right color. Then I tell the maid what to get from the market. After that there’s vegetables to cut, and breakfast and lunch and dinner to cook.”

  It sounded terribly dreary to me.

  “And when the brothers come back from school I make them something nice to snack on, maybe some hot fried singaras or some rasogollahs,” Runu proudly continued, “and in between there’s quilts to be put out on the terrace in the sun,
you won’t believe how musty everything gets….”

  I couldn’t stand it any longer. “Wait, doesn’t your mother-in-law help with any of it?”

  “Oh yes, but I tell her not to. She’s getting old and frail, poor lady, and she’s worked so hard her entire life. It’s only fair that she should rest now.”

  To me Runu’s mother-in-law looked tough as alligator hide and fit enough to outlast us both by decades. But I didn’t say anything.

  “There are servants to do some of the heavier work,” Runu was saying. “But you know how it is.” She shook her head wisely, almost like her mother-in-law might have. “They’ll steal the clothes off your back if you don’t watch them like a hawk.”

  I thought of how, when we were growing up, Runu would meet me secretly on the roof on summer nights so we could watch shooting stars and make up stories about them. We believed that if we saw one falling exactly at midnight, we could wish on it and the wish would be granted.

  Even the night before we were to be married, we had gone up to the roof together at Runu’s urging.

  “Oh, I do hope there’ll be a midnight star for us to wish on,” Runu had whispered.

  I didn’t believe in shooting stars anymore. I knew they were merely burning meteors that had no power to help anyone, not even themselves. But I heard the longing in Runu’s voice and hoped there would be a star for her.

  And now, just one year since then, that wistful girl seemed to be gone forever. In her place was a pragmatic housewife concerned only with mildewed quilts and lazy servants.

  I sat there in that backyard watching the sun’s rays falling dappled and golden over Runu and her mending. Through the dust motes that hung in the heavy afternoon light, her small, animated face seemed suddenly far away, beyond reach, like something at the bottom of the sea which might at any moment, if the current changed, blur or even disappear. It frightened me.