I wanted to say something sympathetic. But myriad images were tumbling around in my head, hot and crackling like clothes inside a dryer that’s been left on too long. Ashok’s taunting smile, I‘ll tell you who it is if you ask very nicely. His hand pressed to Meena’s back. The palloo of Meena’s sari flickering like a tongue of flame through the dark dance floor. Her eyes wide as a startled deer’s, denying that she had kept any secrets from me. Was Ashok her lover? Was that what Srikant had come to tell me?
“Let me go make you some tea,” I said, pressing my trembling hands together. “Please—I need some too.”
In the kitchen I reached past the packets of Instant Lip-ton’s that I generally used to the small metal box of Darjeeling tea my mother had sent for my last birthday. I peeled cardamom seeds and crumbled cloves and mixed them in with the cut black leaves as Indian women had for centuries, and when the water came to a boil I stirred it all in. The aroma of my childhood filled the room, calming me a little.
Behind me Srikant said, “You have a beautiful kitchen.”
I whirled around. I hadn’t heard him follow me in. He looked awkward and out of place, as though, like most traditional Indian males, he rarely entered a kitchen. After the divorce he’d probably have to learn how to cook for himself. But maybe he’d just continue with Big Macs and Taco Bell burritos. Perhaps such things didn’t matter to him.
“Everything’s so clean,” Srikant was saying wonderingly.
I looked around, seeing the kitchen for a moment as he must. I was proud of the blue flowered curtains that matched the airy wallpaper perfectly, the geraniums on the sill that glowed red and orange, the shiny copper-bottomed pots and pans that hung from their hooks. I would spend hours polishing those pots, lulled by the steady back and forth movement of my hands, the pungent, metallic odor of Brasso.
“Yes,” I said heavily.
Srikant must have heard the bitterness in my voice, but he made no comment. Nor did he look surprised. “I’ve decided to let Meena have the house, though she’ll probably sell it. When I get back from India, I’ll get an apartment up in San Francisco.”
“San Francisco! Won’t it be a long commute for you?”
Srikant nodded. “Yes. But I’ve always wanted to live in the city,” he said, holding out a cup for me to fill.
I looked at him, taken aback. His plain, dark-skinned face, his neatly combed-back hair which had been the same all the years I’d known him, except now it was thinning a little. His stolid mustache. I’d never have thought him the type. It was another reminder of how little I understood people.
“And Meena? What will she do?” I asked as I poured.
Srikant shrugged. “What will you do?” he asked me.
My hand shook so violently that the hot tea spilled over the edge of the saucer onto Srikant’s hand, onto the cuff of his shirt. He flinched.
“I’m terribly sorry,” I said, rushing to get a paper nap kin. I wiped his hand and rubbed at the stains on his cuff, but all the while I was thinking, Ashok. He means what’ll I do when Ashok leaves with Meena.
“Don’t worry please, I’m fine,” said Srikant, and he put his other hand over mine.
I looked down at his hand, the little hairs curling on the backs of his fingers, his honest, blunt nails. There was something unexpectedly comforting about its solidity, its warm weight. Under it, I didn’t feel ashamed of my hand the way I did when Ashok—rarely now—clasped it in his manicured one.
Srikant saw me looking and removed his hand, but unhurriedly. He drank his tea and rinsed the cup and saucer and set them carefully on the drying rack.
I wanted to ask, What did you mean by … But I couldn’t. I couldn’t stand Srikant knowing that I didn’t know about Ashok, couldn’t stand the pity that would fill his eyes.
“When do you leave?” I said instead.
“Tomorrow.” Srikant glanced at his watch. “Goodness, it’s two already. I’d better get home and finish packing.”
At the door he said, “I meant what I said, you know, about how nice you look.” The lines at the corners of his eyes shone faintly, like the lines one sometimes finds deep within a block of ice. “I hope we’ll still remain friends, you and I, after all this is over.”
I nodded, swallowing. I wanted to say something profound and wise and reassuring to cheer him on that long, lonely flight to India, but nothing came. “Penguins are beautiful when they’re in the water,” I finally told him.
He laughed, and I thought he’d take my hand again, perhaps kiss it, and what I’d do if he did. But he didn’t. “I’ll call you when I get back from India,” he said.
That night in bed, under the protective cover of the dark, I asked, “Ashok, are you faithful to me?”
As soon as the words were out, I was embarrassed by how old-fashioned they sounded. I was afraid that Ashok would make fun of me. I was even more frightened that he’d give me a serious answer.
But he merely sounded annoyed. “What kind of a stupid question is that? I should never have told you about Meena—it’s got you obsessed.”
“Ashok,” I persisted, “do you love me?” I held my breath and waited in the tense silence.
“It’s a bit late to ask that, don’t you think?” Ashok said at last with a sigh. Now his voice sounded old. Tired. We were all running out of time.
“Let’s sleep, Abha. I have a meeting early tomorrow.”
Sitting in my car across the street from Meena’s house, I watched the leaves of the maple tree on her lawn change from green to gray to purple-black as the sun went down. I sighed, trying to stretch my legs, but there wasn’t enough space for it. I’d been waiting for over an hour now—it was long past the time when Meena usually came home—and it struck me suddenly that perhaps, now that Srikant was in India, she wouldn’t come home at all.
Ten more minutes, I said to myself. Ten minutes and I’ll leave. But I knew I wouldn’t. I’d wait all night if I had to.
Then I saw her in the rearview mirror. She drove slowly, as though deep in thought, and after she’d pulled into her driveway and switched off the engine, she sat in her car for a while. She hadn’t noticed me yet.
When she finally stepped out, I saw that her black skirt ended well above her knees. Much too short to wear to work, a disapproving voice inside me said. But another part of me noted how her legs, long and graceful and bare-looking in sheer panty hose, gleamed in the light from the street lamp.
I caught up with her at the door. The sharp click of her heels had camouflaged my footsteps, so that when I said hello she turned with a little scream. The papers she had been carrying fell, scattering all over the steps.
“Abha! What are you doing here?”
I almost laughed. They were just about the same words I’d used when Srikant showed up at my door. In all our different lives, perhaps, there were only a few situations that repeated themselves over and over, and only a few responses we had for them. I wondered how many women were lying sleepless like me through the night-dark, eyes burning from tears that wouldn’t come, because their husbands were having affairs with their best friends.
“Abha?”
I watched Meena as she gathered the fallen sheets together into an untidy pile. I didn’t apologize, and I didn’t offer to help. When she was done I said, “Srikant came over to talk to me yesterday.”
A tremor passed over her face. Was it guilt or relief?
“Come inside,” she said.
We sat across the dining table from each other, our glasses of juice untouched. My words, words I’d finally wrenched out of myself, hung in the silence. How could you have done this to me, Meena? At first I wasn’t sure if I meant the affair itself, or the fact that it was with Ashok, or that she had kept it from me. Then I knew. I could have forgiven her the first one, and even the second, if only she hadn’t done the third.
“How could you not tell me?” I said again.
In spite of her makeup Meena’s lips looked ashy. Parched. “I was afrai
d to. I knew you’d be upset. You disapprove of my clothes, even. How could I tell you I’d fallen in love with another man?”
Love. The word was like a blow from a hammer of ice. It gave me a sensation of vertigo, of falling from a great, airless height. Somehow I hadn’t thought of an affair quite like that.
“You’ve always been so good,” Meena continued in a rush. “A good wife, a good homemaker. Perfect at all the things I didn’t want to do but knew I should. Like a mother, kind of. I wanted your approval. Needed it. For a long time I told myself, I’ve got to stay with Srikant. What will Abha say otherwise?”
I stared at her. It was hard to take in what she was saying. Meena, beautiful Meena, whom I’d envied and admired and adored, wanting my approval.
“But I just couldn’t keep on. Our marriage—there was nothing left in it—if there had ever been anything. I felt I was slowly drying up inside, my blood turning to dust.” She looked into my face doubtfully. “I don’t think you can really understand.”
But I did. It came to me that the marriage she was describing was my own. If I slit open my wrists right now, I would find only salt powder.
“And this man—he made me feel so special. He understood all the things I wanted out of life—he wanted the same things. With him I didn’t feel greedy or guilty or ashamed.”
I remembered the way the hard handsomeness of Ashok’s face would soften when he looked at Meena. Had I too repressed him, made him feel all those negative things?
“I couldn’t face trying to explain it to you—the expression I knew you’d have in your eyes. Do you know when you get really upset your eyes get opaque, like chips of slate? If I told you I needed to do this to be happy, you’d say happiness isn’t as important as doing the right thing. If I told you that every night I looked at my bottle of sleeping pills and wanted to take them all, you’d say, stop being so melodramatic, Meena. So Californian. Pull yourself together.”
No, I wanted to cry. But she was right. I would have said all those things.
“That’s why I told Ashok. I wanted him to break the news to you.”
“I wish you’d told me yourself,” I said tiredly. “It would have hurt a lot less than having Ashok tell me that the two of you were having an affair.”
Meena looked bewildered. “Ashok said that?”
“Not in so many words, but …”
“Abha, the man I was talking about works in my office. He’s American. His name is Charles. We’re going to get married as soon as my divorce comes through.”
I waited for the relief to hit me, but it never came. I wasn’t even surprised, not really. It was as if a part of me had always known.
“How could you think I’d get involved with your husband?” Meena was saying now, her injured eyes the color of crushed velvet. “How could you think that of me?”
As I reached out to clasp her hand, it struck me that it had been something else all this time, not Ashok, not even Meena, that I’d been so unhappy about.
“Abha! Where the hell have you been?”
I took my time answering. I liked the way Ashok’s voice sounded, the sharp edge of worry in it. I hadn’t heard that in a while.
“I was at Meena’s. Don’t tell me you waited up just for me!”
“As a matter of fact, I did.”
“Well! Aren’t you the one who’s always saying I shouldn’t get worked up when you come home late from meetings?”
“You could have phoned, at least. You know how late it is? Half past eleven.”
“Poor Ashok.” I was enjoying this. “Is it way past your bedtime? Why don’t you go on and sleep—I have a few things to finish up.”
I started up the stairs. Behind me Ashok asked, his tone petulant, “What on earth did you have to talk about for so long, anyway?”
“Why don’t you ask Meena the next time you see her,” I said sweetly.
But by the time I got to the spare bedroom, my feeling of righteous triumph had evaporated. I couldn’t just blame things on Ashok. It wasn’t that simple.
I took out my notepad and looked at the questions that I had written—such a long time ago, it seemed. The answers to them had all changed, and so had I. It astonished me how little I’d known then, how shackled my thinking had been. Not that I’d got rid of all those chains—that would probably take the rest of my life. But I was starting.
When Meena showed me a photo of Charles, I’d been surprised all over again. I’d expected someone handsome, dashing. Maybe even a little bit like Ashok. But he was just an ordinary middle-aged man, with kind eyes and a bald spot, no better-looking than Srikant.
“I know,” Meena had said, flushing a little. “He isn’t much to look at.” She’d wiped a dust fleck off the photo tenderly, carefully, with the edge of her handkerchief and stared at it for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was almost shy. “But he understands me, all of me, even the bad parts. With him I can be myself, like I never could before this.”
Had I ever really been myself? I didn’t think so. All my energy had been taken up in being a good daughter. A good friend. And of course a good wife.
I wrote down the fourth question, the one I’d been afraid to face until now. What are you going to do about your own life, Abha? And suddenly I knew that that was what Srikant had meant yesterday. That was what he’d really come to ask.
Just before I left her house Meena had said, “Sometimes I still feel so guilty. I think of what my parents will say, and Srikant’s mother, when they find out. Selfish, they’ll call me. Immoral. A bad woman. I have to keep telling myself I’m not that. It’s not wrong to want to be happy, is it? To want more out of life than fulfilling duties you took on before you knew what they truly meant?”
The face of my own mother—disappointed, sorrowful, shamed—filled my vision for a moment.
“No,” I said, speaking as much to myself as to Meena. I took the edge of my dupatta and gently wiped the mascara streaks from her wet cheeks. “It’s not wrong. This way you both get another chance.”
As I drove back from Meena’s, the letter I would write was already taking form in my head. The shapes of the words I’d use were foreign, their taste at once sad and exhilarating.
The old rules aren’t always right. Not here, not even in India.
The headlights of the car had carved looming monster-shapes out of the familiar trees and buildings and road signs.
I feel your resentment growing around me, thick and red and suffocating. Like mine is suffocating you.
I’ll take one of the dusty suitcases from under the bed. Half the money from the savings account. My wedding jewelry. My car. That would keep me for a few months. There were cheap motels in the little towns on the peninsula, Redwood City, San Mateo. Rooming houses. And even in the city, in the not-so-good areas. Some of them run by Indians. I’d seen them on a news show a while back. Maybe someone would let me stay for a lower rate if I did some work. Filing, accounts, even cleaning rooms.
We’re spiraling toward hate. And hopelessness. That’s not what I want for the rest of my life. Or yours.
I’ll go to that Mughal restaurant. Offer to cook for free for a few days. Surely when the owner saw how good I was he’d give me the job.
Sitting on the guest bed now in a house that had never, for all its comforts, been my home, I closed my eyes and tried to see my new life—not as I wanted but as it really would be. Struggling to maneuver enormous skillets and saucepans and tandoor ovens in a vast, dark kitchen with the smell of old grease heavying the air, amid the heat and the sweat and the curse words of the rushing waiters. Living in a one-room apartment above some garage where on my off-days I heated soup over a burner. Scrubbing the buckling linoleum in a motel toilet off of Highway 101.
It’s better this way, each of us freeing the other before it’s too late …
Yes, I believe it—I have to believe it. In spite of my beautiful, calm kitchen which I must leave behind. In spite of the pity in the eyes of the Indian wom
en when they hear. The gossip in India. My parents’ anger. Family dishonor. In spite of Ashok, the empty ache when I remember—as I know I will—the feel of his body next to me in bed, his hair smelling of mint leaves and dried rain.
… so we can start learning, once more, to live.
And Srikant—no, I won’t think about him now. There’ll be time enough for that later on, when I’ve begun to pull the unraveled edges of my existence into a new design, one I cannot guess at yet.
I tore a sheet out of the notebook.
Dear Ashok, I began.
MEETING
MRINAL
I WAS TAKING A MR. P’S PEPPERONI PIZZA OUT OF THE freezer when I heard the front door slam. A moment later Dean, as my teenage son Dinesh prefers to be addressed, sauntered into the kitchen.
“Hi, Mom!” he said, running his hands through his hair which, since his latest visit to the barber, stands up like the bristles of a scrubbing brush.
The last of the sun glinted on his stud earring, making me blink. He was wearing his favorite T-shirt, black, with MEGADETH slashed across it in bloodred letters. I tried not to sigh. At least he wasn’t wearing his other favorite, in purple and neon pink, bearing the legend Suicidal Tendencies.
“Gourmet pizza again, I see.” Now the sun glinted on his teeth as well.
I didn’t know exactly how to read that smile—so many things were different about Dinesh in the last eleven months, since his father left. “Is that OK with you?” I asked, feeling a little guilty. “Shall I fix you something else?”
“Nah, don’t bother, pizza’s fine with me.” He shrugged, beginning to turn away.
“Dinesh …” I started, then broke off. I wanted to run my hand along the roughness of his cheek, to ask him, like I used to, to tell me all about his day. But the old words and gestures seemed somehow inadequate.
Arranged Marriage: Stories Page 22