Arranged Marriage: Stories

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  “Mmmm, sausage and mushrooms!” he was saying, his voice raised for my benefit. “Smells great!”

  My stomach growled. Sausage and mushrooms are my favorite pizza toppings. But even the extra-hot chicken sitting uneaten in the kitchen would have tasted pretty good to me at this point. I’d started, halfheartedly, on another one of my diets this morning, and I hadn’t eaten anything since a spartan lunch of iceberg lettuce with no dressing. But of course I couldn’t go downstairs, where Ashok was lying in wait. So I gritted my teeth and went back to question one.

  Why? Why? Why? I wrote. Was she bored? Did she want to shake up Srikant? Make him sit up and stop taking her for granted? Or had she found someone she couldn’t resist?

  But what kind of man would be worth giving up your principles for? What kind of man would be more important than being a good wife?

  I liked Srikant, Meena’s husband. He wasn’t handsome and suave and clever like Ashok, but from observing him over the years I felt he had a good heart. Living with Ashok has made me particularly appreciative of good-hearted people.

  Srikant wasn’t a big talker. When he and Meena came over for dinner, he’d sit back and listen to Meena and Ashok laughing at each others wickedly witty jokes, commenting on people and books and TV shows I didn’t even know existed. Sometimes from the kitchen, while I fried the samosas I’d made from scratch, or put the finishing touches on a particularly fine qurma, I would notice a wistful look flit over Srikant’s face. I wondered if he was thinking, as he watched their animated gestures, how well they suited each other. Others thought so too. When we went out together, Meena and Ashok entering a restaurant ahead of us with their long-legged stride, his hand possessively on her elbow, waiters often took them to be a couple. They probably made the same error about Srikant and myself, darker, shorter, quieter, hurrying to catch up, and too traditional to even touch hands.

  When Srikant did have something to say, it was usually about his work. I guess he felt about it like I did about my cooking. As he described the latest software product he was developing, his voice would go deep and his eyes would shine. Forgetting awkwardness, he would sketch forms in the air with eloquent hands, and for a moment he would be almost handsome.

  Then Meena would break in, laughing.

  “I swear, that computer’s like his second wife—no, his mistress! He spends more time with it than with me. Do you know that he’s even given it a name?”

  Srikant would smile shamefacedly.

  “Lalita! He actually calls it Lalita!” Meena’s laugh would be high and brittle.

  Srikant would look down, examining his square, blunt nails.

  “I used to be dreadfully jealous when we were first married. Srikant would stay on at work till all kinds of hours, even though I kept telling him I hated being alone in the house. It was so deathly quiet, not like India, where something’s always going on—street vendors, servants, people dropping in to gossip….”

  “How horrible that must have been,” Ashok would interject, his voice low and sympathetic as it never was when I complained about something, sending an ache through me.

  I’d want to come to Srikant’s defense. It’s what all of us Indian wives went through, I’d want to tell Meena. Why, Ashok still does the same thing. But already she would be telling us about all the things she’d tried to get Srikant to come home early.

  “I even bought a Betty Crocker cookbook and fixed him special dinners—stroganoff and soufflés and lime pies. Me! Can you imagine!”

  We would all laugh because, unlike me, Meena is a terrible cook. She and Srikant virtually live on fast food and Chinese takeout.

  “That’s probably what drove him into Lalita’s arms,” Ashok would quip.

  “Probably. Anyway, my cooking efforts didn’t last long, and after a while I got used to being on my own….”

  “And now no doubt you’ve discovered that there are advantages to your husband not being around.”

  “No! What could they be?” Meena would ask in her most ingenuous voice, fluttering her lashes.

  “Remind me to tell you sometime when Srikant and Abha aren’t around,” Ashok would say with a wink. And the two of them would burst into laughter, with Srikant and me joining in just a few seconds late.

  That’s how they always kidded around. Until today, I’d never let it bother me, because I was Meena’s special friend, her only confidante. She might joke with Ashok, flirt even. She might be the life of the parties we attended—the best amateur stand-up comic, as one of our friends (a man, naturally) said. But it was me she turned to when she was unhappy.

  I knew things about Meena that no one else did—how she still turned on the TV evenings when Srikant was late coming back so she wouldn’t have to listen to the silence, how she slept with the light on when he went out of town. I was the one who held her and tried to calm her when, after her miscarriage last year, the doctor said that something was wrong with her uterus and she might never be able to have a baby. When her tears dampened the shoulder of my sari, I too had wept. That was another bond that held us close, the unspoken sorrow of being childless.

  That’s why I couldn’t be resentful of Meena, not even when Ashok compared our looks. That’s why I forgave her her slicing wit, even if, once in a while, she turned it on me. She needed me more than anyone in my life ever had—the way I’d hoped, when I’d got married, my husband and babies might.

  But not anymore, I thought as I pressed my nails into my aching temples. Now she had a man to share her most intimate joys and fears with, and she had Ashok to tell it all to.

  My usually pristine kitchen was a mess. Half-cooked food, unwashed dishes, vegetable peelings in the sink—and now crusts of pizza lying in an open Domino’s box. I could feel the Parmesan cheese under my feet, sticky and coarse as sand. Thank God, at least, that Ashok had gone to bed. I couldn’t have faced his taunting smile on top of everything else.

  I considered leaving everything the way it was, but I knew I’d just have to deal with it in the morning. So I mopped the floor and washed up and took out the trash and boiled some rice for myself. It was 2 A.M. when I sat down to eat my rice and extra-peppery chicken.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I was up so late. I like my sleep. Usually Ashok is the night person. If there’s a party that’s going to run into the small hours, we either drive separately or—we’ve started doing this more and more—he goes alone. I’m quite happy at home by myself, listening to one of my classical music tapes—a night raga by Chaurasia, maybe, the haunting notes of his flute hanging over me as I work on next week’s recipe for The Indian Courier. And when I go to bed I fall asleep immediately. I’m lucky in that, I guess. Meena now—she’s a real insomniac, especially if she’s upset. A little thing—her boss making a negative comment about her performance, or a letter from her mother about her sister’s new baby—can keep her up all night. She told me once that when she’s awake late she can hear the house breathing—a hushed panting, like a crouched beast’s.

  I listened as I sat there at the kitchen table, my mouth burning from the chicken, my diet ruined, but I didn’t hear a thing except the refrigerator’s hum. Still, it was eerie, all that silence, like black snow falling around me. On an impulse I turned on the TV.

  I’m not much of a TV person. I watch a couple of cooking programs each week, and news on the days when I’m feeling socially responsible. And on weekend mornings, for a taste of home, I turn on the international channel where they show song-and-dance scenes from popular Hindi movies, though even those are getting bad, with the young girls in skimpy skirts and low-cut blouses, letting the men touch them here and there. I can’t seem to relate to the regular American shows, the ones Ashok watches. The people on TV—the men with their hair cut in the latest mode and tanned faces out of which shine eyes blue as stones, the women with their high, high heels, their carefully made-up mouths, their tiny waists and breasts that never sag—seem to inhabit an alien world of romance and intrigue and
designer clothes that fit perfectly.

  The couple on the screen right now weren’t wearing designer clothes, though. In fact, they weren’t wearing anything at all, and when I got over the shock I realized that I’d turned on the cable channel which Ashok had ordered last month and which he watched, in spite of the fact that I pointedly left the room whenever he turned it on (or maybe because of it), almost every night.

  My face hot, I switched off the TV. Really, the things they’ll show on the air nowadays, I said to myself indignantly as I got up to leave. It was a good thing we didn’t have kids in the house.

  Halfway up the stairs I stopped. I stood there for a while, listening to the wall clock ticking, and then I came down and, heart pounding, turned on the set again. I wasn’t sure why I did it. Maybe I just wanted to examine, without the inhibition of his presence, what it was that Ashok enjoyed about these shows. Or maybe it was something else.

  The couple were walking along the edge of a swimming pool now, tall and unself-conscious, while the reflected light from the water shimmered over their nakedness. The woman dived into the pool and the man followed. Unhindered by clothing, their limbs cut cleanly through the blue, and when they came together bubbles broke and rose around them like silver beads. I knew intuitively that they weren’t married. Their mouths and hands explored the curves and hollows of each other’s bodies with a frank delight that was very different from our awkward, furtive movements in the darkened bedroom. When the man’s lips closed around the tight pinkness of the woman’s nipple, I watched carefully. A part of me was surprised that I felt none of the shame that would have ordinarily overwhelmed me. Perhaps the dim blue swirl of water in which they rocked, suspended, gave the act a softness, a sense of surreality. Or perhaps shame is something you feel only when someone is watching you watch. When the man’s head moved lower to the half-moon of her navel, and then lower still, I clenched my fists and leaned forward. My nails dug into my palms, hard, like hers were digging into his shoulders. And when her body arched upward, shuddering, my body too gave an answering shudder.

  Later I lay in bed, listening to Ashok breathe, thinking. Had I been wrong all this time, when I refused to let him turn the lights on as we made love, when I lay stiff and submissive under his thrusts until he was done with it? When I escaped thankfully to the bathroom to wash myself as soon as he moved off me? Had my mother, too, been wrong when, the night before my wedding, she had explained to me that a good wife’s duty was to allow her husband to satisfy himself no matter how unpleasant she found it? For the first time I wondered how happy my father had been with her, and she with him.

  I watched the dark line of Ashok’s shoulder and remembered. Early in our marriage, once or twice, he’d suggested doing things differently, trying something new. He’d even bought a book—The Joy of Sex, I think it was called—and shown it to me almost shyly. But I’d reacted with such undisguised horror that he hadn’t brought it up again.

  Was that when he started turning his acid humor on me?

  I put out a hesitant hand to touch his throat. His skin was warm and supple, and when I brought my face to it, it smelled of musk and maleness. Ashok muttered in his sleep, a word I couldn’t catch. He made a brushing-off movement, as one might with a mosquito. The back of his hand struck my mouth as he turned away.

  That night I dreamed of a man and woman underwater. I knew right away that it wasn’t the couple in the movie. They ran their hands along each other’s bodies with feverish haste, their muscles straining as though it was their first time together. When the swirling blue cleared and the man finally lifted his mouth from the dark patch of woman-hair fine and wavy as water grass, I saw that it was Ashok. I drew him up, up, and pulled him hard into my hips. We came together, my legs wrapped tight around him, bubbles exploding into crystal fragments around us. And then I saw my face, the way you do in dreams. It was blind with ecstasy, my mouth open in a soundless, triumphant cry, my hair spreading around my head, black and wild and maenadic. Only it wasn’t my face. It was Meena’s.

  I noticed her as soon as I stepped into the Taj restaurant, where Kuldeep and Saroj were holding their tenth anniversary celebration. How could I not? In her sheer orange chiffon sari she flamed in the center of the banquet hall, and the men gathered around her, wearing the dark, conservative suits that successful Indians favored, seemed like bemused moths. Srikant was nowhere in sight.

  “My, is that a backless choli she’s wearing?” said Ashok. “Your friend’s grown quite reckless, wouldn’t you say? Maybe it’s the effect of the affair….”

  I didn’t respond. The choli was, indeed, very backless. I got a good view of it as Meena turned to accept a drink that someone was holding out to her. Nothing except a couple of golden strings held it together. Beside me, Ashok gave a low, approving whistle.

  In spite of myself I was shocked. And furious with Meena for her foolishness. Didn’t she know that every woman in the room would be whispering about that choli? I could already hear the comments.

  Indecent.

  Where on earth did she get such a thing? And to have the boldness to wear it here.

  If I were her husband, I’d tell her a thing or two.

  Tell! My dear, it’s not telling she needs. It’s a good beating.

  Talk of this kind was the last thing Meena, who already had a reputation for being different and a little dangerous, could afford. Especially now.

  So what? said a small voice inside me. Why are you so concerned with what they think of Meena? Why do you feel like you have to protect her?

  I didn’t have an answer to that. I guess it was something I’d always done. Perhaps it was because, in spite of her worldliness, Meena understood our Indian friends far less than I did.

  The men, for example, even the ones clustered around her, laughing at her jokes, they too would have things to say about her in the privacy of the men’s room, things followed by winks and lewd, derisive laughter. For in spite of their Bill Blass suits and alligator-skin shoes and the sleek Benzes that waited obediently for them in the parking lots, they still belonged to the villages of their fathers. Villages where a woman caught in adultery was made to ride around the market square on a donkey, her head shaved, her clothes stripped off her, while crowds jeered and pelted her with garbage.

  “Abha dear, here you are finally!”

  Startled, I whirled around. I hadn’t noticed Meena leaving her group of admirers. Now she leaned forward to give me—and then Ashok—a kiss on the cheek. It was not something Indians did as a rule—but then that was Meena. I watched her bright lips grazing my husband’s cheek and his smile as he whispered something in her ear, and I remembered my dream.

  “Abha, you’re not listening!”

  It took me a moment to focus on Meena’s animated face.

  “They’re going to have dancing before dinner. It’s going to start in a few minutes. Isn’t that something!”

  I nodded as I watched two men wheel in assorted stereo equipment and put up strobe lights on stands and hang mirrored spheres from the ceiling. Dancing was uncommon at Indian parties, at least among our friends, whose idea of a good time consisted mostly of a bottle of Johnnie Walker and a plateful of biriyani, with some spicy gossip on the side.

  “Kuldeep and Saroj are going all out to make an impression, aren’t they?” Meena said, her eyes sparkling, her foot already tapping.

  “And all this for their tenth anniversary! I wonder what they’ll do for their twentieth!” said Ashok.

  “That’s if they’re still together,” I said dryly.

  Meena and Ashok both turned and looked at me. They weren’t used to hearing me talk like that.

  “My, we’re getting cynical,” said Ashok. Then he turned back to Meena and gave her an elaborate bow. “May I have the first dance, ma’am?”

  “Of course!” Meena’s laugh was like a flock of white birds flying up into the sky all at once. “That is, if Abha doesn’t mind?”

  I felt a stab of dis
appointment. I wasn’t a dancer. Still, it would have been nice if my husband had asked me first.

  By the time I’d pulled myself together sufficiently to say it was fine with me, Ashok and Meena were gone.

  I leaned against the wall and looked on as he drew her to the middle of the surprisingly crowded floor. Maybe it was the novelty of it that made people eager to dance. Or maybe it was that the large chandelier lights had been replaced by semidarkness.

  The first song was a fast number, a hit from a recent Hindi film. Under the pulsing of the strobes, the movements of the dancers took on a fragmented, disembodied quality, and faces I’d known for years looked like those of strangers. But there was no mistaking Ashok and Meena. They were without a doubt the most graceful pair on the floor. The other couples, brought up in a culture of sitar and tabla and years of warnings that nice girls didn’t move their bodies like that, tried valiantly to follow the beat. But their elbows and knees stuck out at stiff, ungainly angles, and when they shook their hips and behinds, it was in an uncomfortable caricature of the film stars they had watched on their VCRs. I wondered what they thought as they watched Ashok and Meena glide by, their faces illuminated by the silver light from the revolving spheres overhead. When he spun her around, Travolta-like, until she ended up in his arms, her hair tangling around his throat like a live thing, were their eyes dazzled, like mine, by the flash and glitter of the gold strings of that backless choli?

  No, I whispered to myself. He wouldn’t have said anything to me if he was the one Meena was having the affair with. But my voice, weak and unconvinced, was drowned by the clamor inside my head. Yes, yes, yes. It would be the perfect victory, the perfect revenge for all those sexless, love-less years.

  For that was what I came to realize in the banquet hall of the Taj with the broken light from the mirrored spheres lying around me: I hadn’t loved Ashok all these years, not really, though I believed I had. I’d been too busy being a good wife.