“You’ll forget about such so-called friends when you get married,” Ma said, starting to knit again. “I don’t need friends, do I? You two girls and Baba are my whole life.”
Asha stifled a groan. She didn’t want to be Ma’s whole life. Or even one-third of it. But she knew from experience that arguing was useless. Her mother could never understand Asha’s friendship with Kavita. It wasn’t about competition and rivalry, the way middle-class Bengali housewives in Delhi interacted. Osh and Kavi rejoiced over each other’s victories and suffered through each other’s struggles. They ran around the academy courtyard during tea break, organizing games for their class until everyone who joined in was sweaty and laughing. Asha was going to miss practicing tennis and cricket in Kavi’s family’s enclosed garden; she was going to miss their long talks and laughter. But suddenly, in the face of Ma’s certainty, Asha felt a twinge of doubt. Could even the closest of friendships stand the test of time and distance? Would Kavi vanish into Asha’s past like Ma’s childhood?
No, Asha told herself fiercely. I’ll never forget Kavi. And she’ll never forget me. We’ll be friends forever, just as we promised. She tucked the pen into her bag next to the diary. She’d been stupid to take them out, even though she’d been longing to write ever since they got on the train.
Ma frowned at her red rectangle, holding it at a distance to find a dropped stitch. “That girl’s a bad influence, anyway. I don’t like how she gave you another tennis racket after I forbade you to play.”
This time, it took Asha immense amounts of energy not to debate her mother’s point. She was battling the fury that always flamed when she remembered how Ma had given away her tennis racket and cricket bat to the servants. The bat was cheap, and Baba had bought another just like it, but the racket was an irreplaceable wooden Chris Evert from America, and Asha had won it as a first prize in a tournament. She would have liked to keep it forever as a memory of playing tennis with Baba. And trouncing boy after boy while he watched.
Their father had learned tennis when he’d studied engineering in London, and he joined a club in Delhi after he and Ma settled there as newlyweds. He’d started teaching Asha when she was seven, and she’d learned so fast that Baba encouraged her to start playing competitively. He and Reet stood at the sidelines cheering, and people came from miles around to witness the unusual sight of a girl winning matches in an all-boy juniors league. An Indian Billie Jean King or Virginia Wade, they called her. Or Vijaya, the female version of the name Vijay, after the more famous Amritraj brother, who the past year had actually made it all the way to the quarterfinals at Wimbledon. Asha and Baba had listened to the matches on the radio, shouting like maniacs every time Amritraj hit a winner.
Asha played tennis for five years, until the day she’d woken her sister in a panic after finding rust-colored stains in her underwear. Everything changed with her body on that day, and there was no going back. Asha could no longer wear shorts or pants—only salwar kameez and her school uniform. She’d had to start growing her hair. No more going down the hill to the market with Baba or playing cricket with Kavi and the neighborhood boys in the street. And worst of all, it wasn’t proper for a young woman to play tennis with boys at the club.
When Ma issued her final edict about tennis, Asha had lost her temper, shouting at her mother with the servants in earshot. Baba had taken his younger daughter into another room, closed the door, and delivered an unusually stern lecture. She’d listened quietly, her anger spent.
“It’s my fault, Tuni,” Baba ended. “Ma’s right; I’ve spoiled you and it’s time I faced facts. But even so, I will not permit you to talk to your mother like that. Ever.”
Baba so rarely laid down the law that Asha always obeyed when he did.
“I don’t know how Punjabi parents train their daughters,” Ma said now, needles battling each other like swords again. “But in a good Bengali home, a girl obeys her mother. Especially while other people are around.”
Asha was still swallowing anger over losing her racket, her tennis, and her freedom. And now maybe even her friendship with Kavi.
“Did you hear me, Tuni?” Ma asked. “Do not bring shame to me or your father in your grandmother’s house.”
Asha took a deep breath. “I’ll try, Ma,” she made herself say, but the words took a mighty effort, and only the memory of her father’s face allowed her to mean them.
THREE
THE TRAIN MOVED STEADILY SOUTHEAST FROM THE STATE OF Uttar Pradesh and through the plains of Bihar, finally reaching the state of West Bengal by the time morning came. It was drawing closer to the neighboring country of Bangladesh, where three years earlier a war between India and Pakistan had devastated homes and farms and villages. The suffering, along with countless refugees, still spilled across the border.
Asha woke first and peered through the window. The villages they passed were crowded, the houses more make-shift, and even the cows looked skinnier. The tea sellers who boarded the train during the stops at the stations began speaking Bangla instead of Hindi.
Asha and Reet staggered down the aisle to the bathroom. They took turns grasping each other’s hands for support as they squatted and swayed over the hole in the floor and washed themselves thoroughly. At the small sink, they brushed their teeth and splashed their faces with cold water.
Back in the compartment, Ma had folded up the benches and was repacking her handbag. “We have to put on our sarees, Shona,” she said, shutting and latching the door. “Tuni, block the view.”
Asha held a shawl across the window as Ma and Reet redraped and tucked the long pieces of silk around their bodies. The span of Ma’s still-slender waist was almost as narrow as Reet’s, and their tight blouses clung to their matching curves. Ma’s saree was pink and Reet’s was blue and brand-new, a splurge made to ensure her grand Calcutta entrance.
Watching the painstaking ritual, Asha was glad that Ma had let her wear a salwar kameez. She’d worn sarees to parties for the past couple of years, but she still didn’t feel comfortable swathed in six and a half yards of material. Her green, embroidered traveling salwar kameez was soft, the way she liked it, and there was nothing rounded in sight. Not that she was hiding anything out of sight, either, a fact that didn’t worry her much.
“That’s why I’m fast on the tennis court and the cricket pitch,” she said when Ma moaned about her younger daughter’s slowly changing physique.
“What good is that since you no longer play sports,” Ma retorted.
“I do play sports, in the garden with Kavita.”
“I don’t see why your father allows you to do that.”
“We stay behind the walls, Ma, nobody sees us.”
And so it went. Asha overheard a couple of Ma’s Delhi friends murmuring about how tough it was going to be to marry off a “skinny, underdeveloped girl” like Sumitra’s younger daughter. Apparently a girl had to fill a bra of decent cup size to attract a husband.
That’s good for me, Asha thought, her arms getting tired from holding the shawl across the window. More time to be free. Get my PhD. Do what I really want.
In America, where women were burning bras and fighting for equal rights, they didn’t need curves to snare a husband. Sixteen-year-old American girls could play sports, drive cars, win scholarships, keep studying, even think about staying unmarried if they wanted.
Asha Gupta, tennis champion.
Asha Gupta, psychologist.
Asha Gupta, forever.
Once the sarees were draped to satisfaction, Reet combed Asha’s hair and fixed it in a fresh, tidy braid. Ma tried three different hairstyles on Reet before settling on a thick bun that coiled on the top of her head like a crown. Finally Ma combed out her own long hair, arranged it exactly like Reet’s, and powdered her face again carefully.
When the train pulled into Calcutta’s Howrah station, Ma made them wait until a knock sounded at the compartment door. “Open! Hurry up!” said a voice that sounded so much like her father’s th
at Asha’s heart skipped a beat. But then Reet unlatched the door, and there stood a stockier, grimmer version of Baba—Uncle, head of the clan and master of the home where the two Gupta boys had been raised.
Reet started to welcome him with the traditional greeting for elders, bending to touch his feet with her hands and then tapping her own forehead, but Uncle stopped her before she could complete the whole pronam. “The train is only stopping for a few minutes,” he said. “We have to disembark quickly. I’ve hired a coolie to bring the heavy bags.”
He didn’t seem to speak directly to Ma. It would have been wrong for him to speak freely to his sister-in-law, so that wasn’t unusual. But Uncle went beyond that; Asha had noticed it during their last visit, even though she’d been only twelve then. He hardly even looked at Ma. It was as if he didn’t trust his gaze to find his younger brother’s wife for a second.
The girls and Ma gathered their handbags and followed Uncle to the platform. There he paused briefly to permit the reunion ritual, placing his hands on his nieces’ heads as they touched his feet. Asha turned away as Ma bent before her brother-in-law. Something in her hated to see Ma, proud and strong, bending in front of a man who wasn’t Baba. Of course Ma never gave Baba pronam in greeting—only elderly women still gave their husbands such a traditional sign of submission. Every decent Bengali woman, though, was expected to honor her older brother-in-law with this gesture, and Ma offered it as gracefully as she had four years earlier.
Uncle received Ma’s pronam with his face averted. “Taxi’s waiting,” he grunted, hurrying them along the crowded platform. A thin, agile, red-turbaned coolie followed them, three suitcases stacked on his head.
The beggars descended once the Gupta family left the platform and entered the station. In the prosperous neighborhood where the girls had lived in Delhi, a few beggars used to wander the streets, but they were nothing compared to the multitude of refugees crowding Howrah station. Faces covered with sores, hair matted and straw-yellow from malnutrition, hoisting bony babies on their hips, they wailed or whined about their plight to everyone and anyone.
“Stay together,” Uncle called.
Asha kept her eyes on his broad back. He was striding forward, elbowing people aside and scolding them to make room. Reet clutched Asha’s hand, and Ma stayed so close behind, she kept stepping on the heels of their sandals.
“Ma,” Reet said over her shoulder. “Can’t we give them something?”
“Are you insane?” Ma hissed. “If you give one of them anything, the rest will mob us.”
Asha held her breath. Beggars were pressing so tightly against her, she felt as if she were inhaling the air coming from their mouths. They finally reached the taxi, and the driver flung open the door to the backseat. Ma pushed Reet in first, then Asha, and then gathered her saree and jumped inside before Uncle slammed the door. He stayed outside to make sure their bags were deposited in the cab and to pay the coolie.
Countless hands tapped and pounded the windows of the hot, enclosed taxi. Ma covered her head with the loose end of her saree and leaned her forehead against the back of the driver’s seat.
Asha couldn’t help seeing the faces outside. What were their stories? What were their secrets? Did they have places or people to keep them safe?
One of the beggars pressed an open hand on the window next to Reet, and Reet put her own hand on the glass from the inside. Finger to finger, she positioned her palm until the window became a mirror for the two girls’ hands.
Asha watched the expression on the beggar’s face outside change and relax until something in it seemed familiar. She looks like a younger version of Ma, Asha realized in amazement, as Reet and the girl exchanged grins.
Both hands stayed against the glass until the cab pulled away.
Just as he had last time, all the way to the house, Uncle complained about traffic and barked out directions at the cabdriver. It hurt Asha to hear his voice, so much like Baba’s and yet so different. Four years earlier Baba had been there, chatting with that driver, finding out about his family and what village he came from, asking how and when he’d found his way to the city. Now only Uncle’s voice could be heard; this driver responded with grunts and monosyllables as he maneuvered through streets full of police cars, skinny cows, and people picketing.
The house was in a quiet suburb in the southern outskirts of the city. During the war of independence from British rule in 1947, Asha’s grandparents had fled across the border with their two young sons and spent their savings to buy it. A few of the fancier houses in the neighborhood were well maintained, making the Guptas’ three-story building look shabby in comparison. Uncle’s income as a manager in a chemicals factory provided enough for the family’s living expenses and covered tuition fees for his son and two daughters, but it didn’t cover luxuries like home improvements. Grandmother had counted on Baba’s monthly contributions from Delhi to pay for any repairs and to tuck away some small savings. Four months earlier, of course, that extra money had stopped coming.
Uncle argued over the cab fare as if every penny counted. Last time, Asha remembered, Baba had left the driver grinning over a big tip.
“I’m late for work,” Uncle said as he hurried past them into the house. “Your aunt and grandmother are waiting inside.”
Reet held the gate open. The driver left the suitcases beside them, jumped in his cab, and pulled away. The high iron gate clanged shut.
Asha stared up at the three-story house that still looked run-down since her visit four years before. A path wound through a long garden and led to a screened-in veranda. There were two narrow yards on either side, one with smoke rising from a garbage pile and laundry hanging on a line, the other squeezed between the Gupta house and the large, newly painted house next door.
Coconut and banana trees blocked the sunshine on every side except the front, the windows on the first floor were secured with bars, and the property was completely fenced in. As they waited by their bags, Asha couldn’t help feeling she was about to serve a sentence for a crime she hadn’t committed.
FOUR
A SERVANT WALKED TOWARD ASHA, REET, AND MA, BOWED HIS head slightly in greeting, and took two suitcases inside. Briefcase in hand, Uncle strode back down the path and out the gate again. “I’ll be back in time for tea,” he informed them, and was gone before they could respond.
A voice called from somewhere inside the house. “Come in, come in; don’t worry about that last suitcase, the servant will bring it!”
The girls and Ma left their sandals with the pile of shoes strewn across the veranda. Asha squinted inside the dim house. Two sets of wide eyes peered at her from either side of a saree-clad figure. The saree belonged to Auntie and the eyes to the twins, who came from behind their mother shyly to greet the older cousins they hardly remembered.
The wife of the oldest Gupta brother was showing her age by the thickening of her figure and lines deepening from nose to mouth. Asha caught the envy in Auntie’s eyes as they studied Ma’s smooth skin and hair still as dark as a crow’s feathers. Would she exchange her status as older wife or her educated, prosperous background for a share of Ma’s allure?
Auntie and Ma embraced; no exchange of pronam was necessary between the daughters-in-law of the house. They were supposed to be on equal footing while Grandmother was alive, but during their last visit it had been clear that Auntie was eager to exercise her power as wife of the head of the home.
Grandmother came bustling out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her white cotton saree. Wives like Ma and Auntie painted red stripes along the parts in their hair and wore bangles on both wrists, but Grandmother followed the custom of avoiding colors or extra adornment practiced by widows for generations. She was a widow of character, not like the one that Ma and her friends had gossiped about in their Delhi neighborhood, a childless woman who continued to wear lipstick, high heels, and a rainbow of colors after her husband died. It made Asha furious that a man was free to remarry after his wife�
��s death while a widow faced a lifetime of white sarees, fasting from meat and fish, and endless praying. Asha had always secretly imagined the young Delhi widow finding a new love.
“That terrible cook!” Grandmother was saying. “I told her you’d be hungry, and she didn’t start frying the luchis till just now. Poor Bontu had to leave for office without eating anything.”
Bontu was Uncle’s nickname, and even though he was middle-aged, married, and the father of three children, Grandmother still fussed over him as though he were a schoolboy. Neither of her sons could do wrong in her eyes. Bintu was her nickname for Baba, and if anything, she seemed to dote on her younger son even more than she did on his brother.
After receiving her granddaughters’ pronam, Grandmother took Asha’s chin and tilted it up with her fingertips. “Looks just the same, even though she’s a woman now,” she announced, letting go and shrugging. “She’ll never be a beauty, this one.”
Asha felt as though she’d been slapped. Her own grandmother telling her how ugly she was? She couldn’t remember being appraised like this during their last visit. But of course she had been a child then, not a woman.
Grandmother turned to Asha’s sister, eyes lingering on Reet’s face and shape, taking in the sight as though she’d just lifted the lid of a velvet box. “And how is the pearl of the family?” she asked, stroking Reet’s cheek. “So lovely! So fair!”
Asha’s hands clenched and unclenched as she fought to control her tongue. At Bishop Academy, their teachers warned the girls not to focus on outside appearances. “Character,” students were taught. “Wisdom. Discipline. Courage. Those are the true womanly qualities that stand the test of time.” Asha’s fierce determination to succeed had won the admiration of teachers and students alike. But the feminine attributes that seemed to count in her paternal grandparents’ house had always been skin-deep. And she obviously didn’t have enough of them.
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