“It was only for a few minutes, while I washed my face. I was tired, Sundar.” She scrubs a dinner plate; she washes a cup. Water splashes up onto the front of her bright green blouse. He takes her shoulder with his right hand; he pulls her around.
“Tired? Why?” His voice is sharp. “You do nothing, Sushila. She washed him, fed him, played with him. You had her do it all.”
She holds a half-washed glass in her hands. “I know how to manage her. I always have.”
“She’s a half-wit. We should never—”
Sushila looks up at him, eyebrows raised. “Husband dead, baby dead. A woman alone—where could she go? What life did my sister have?” She looks down again. “And I needed her.”
He turns and paces away a few steps, turns back. “How could you leave them alone?” His voice is low, anguished.
“I just—had to wash my face. Just for a few minutes.” She looks down at her plump hands, wrapped around the wet glass. They are covered in gold rings. “Sundar—what happens now?”
“The police keep looking. We keep looking. We’ll find her.” He sits down, as far from Sushila as he can. “How far could she have gone?” he asks softly.
She says nothing in response, only turns back to the sink. But she does not start washing again. The glass lies cradled in her hand, delicate, fragile.
THE BABY CHUCKLES HAPPILY, NO MATTER WHO IS HOLDING HIM. He is not quite so thin as he was; once the woman has been fed, she begins to produce good milk again. He is getting better, and with each day, he seems more beautiful. He is the most beautiful baby the nuns have seen—though they don’t see so many, other than the scrawny, sickly babies of the parish destitute. They do not name him—he is the baby. Within a few days, he is their baby.
He is as happy with Anne as with Mary, and, more surprisingly, as happy with Teresa as with Anne. The youngest novice is so enamored of the child that she begins to whisper that perhaps he is more than a baby, that he is the Christ child come again. But the others laugh at her, and when she persists, Sister Anne sets her to chapel-cleaning.
As Mary’s health improves, she begins working. She is competent in the kitchen, but seems happiest in the garden. The dry season is ending; it is time to turn the soil, to weed, to plant the seeds and seedlings. She wears the baby in a sling and works peacefully. When she tires, there is always a nun happy to take the child. After a few weeks of this, she seems much better.
THEY WERE SITTING IN HER GARDEN WHEN IT HAPPENED, SUSHILA IN a bright sari, pink like the bougainvillea arching overhead. Her sister, dressed in widow’s white, held the baby, humming to it wordlessly. Her sister had not spoken since the sickness carried away her husband, her own baby. But she had been a good wet-nurse for the baby, had taken such care with it. Even now, she held a hand above its face, shading it from the sun. Before she came to join them, Sushila never took such care.
Sushila watches them, her heart beating faster. She has had an idea. The words are fluttering in her head, aching to get out. She has been beating them back for days, for weeks. But she is about to lose that battle. In a few minutes, she will start talking, softly, quietly, almost as if she is speaking to herself. She will say that there are places for a woman to go. Not here, perhaps, but far away, in the capital city, where Sushila had gone with her mother, her sisters, to buy her wedding jewels and sari. There are places that will take a woman in, will care for her.
She will mention one such place, Holy Family convent, where they had once visited, had had a nice cup of thick, sweet milk tea with the Mother Superior. Sushila will say that a child would be happy in a place like that, sheltered, safe. She will say, even softer, that a child should have a mother who loves him. Then she will rise, will go into the house, leaving them alone there in the garden. She will leave them alone for a long time. Her sister is silent, not stupid.
THE BABY IS SICK. THE CONVENT IS IN CHAOS. THE FLOOR HAS NOT been swept. The rice is burned. Sister Catherine’s mother once mentioned feeding a sick baby drops of ginger juice, and two nuns run to the kitchen to chop and mince and squeeze. The doctor has come once, twice, three times.
The child is pale; he will not drink milk. He sucks for a minute—maybe two—then turns away fretful, crying. The pitiful wail echoes through the long white halls. Mary does not leave him for a moment. She paces the room, she does not sleep. She coaxes him to eat, offering her breast again and again. She hums and murmurs—nonsense sounds, nothing that makes any sense at all. As his face grows hotter, she grows colder. Her hands and feet turn cold as mountain snow, and as the days pass and the baby becomes more ill, she stays on her feet through sheer determination.
The Mother Superior has even come out of her office, once, to look in on Mary, the child, the huddle of nuns with their panicked whispers and scurrying feet. She shakes her head, then turns and goes back in, closing the door behind her.
SUSHILA IS FINISHING HER BATH. SHE TAKES THE TIN DIPPER, POURS the water over her head, down her long black hair and lush body. It has softened in the last year, becoming uncomfortably heavy. Her belly is marked now, her thighs rub together when she walks. Her breasts are finally getting smaller again, but they still hang from her chest. Sushila cannot bear to touch her alien flesh.
Her hands move smoothly, mechanically—dipping the water, pouring it down. It is cold; she shudders. She finishes and steps out of the small room. She dries herself, eyes closed. She wraps a blue silk sari around herself and steps lightly across the corridor, into the bedroom. Sundar is sleeping. His clothes are scattered here and there, wherever he has flung them. She picks his shirt up, quietly, and folds it awkwardly. She looks around the room, uncertain, and then places it on a chair. She picks it up again, and puts it on top of the chest. Then back on the chair.
Sushila sits down on the packed dirt floor, arms wrapped around her knees, and watches her husband sleep. His face is smooth, unlined. He is still as handsome as the day she was married to him. She hadn’t objected when her parents had first brought her to his parents’ house. She had looked up at him once, then cast her eyes down and remained silent. He seemed as good as any other that day, and her mother had said, leaving, that they would have beautiful children. A streak of silver has appeared in his dark hair over the last few weeks, and he sleeps curled in on himself, huddled like an animal in distress. His hands are buried under the sheet, but she knows that they will be tight fists against his body, fingers digging into the palms. She has felt them that way for many nights.
He has not been a bad husband to her. Perhaps she should have taken the road to the convent herself, vowed silence and disappeared into a black robe, a cowl hiding her wealth of silky hair. It had not occurred to her then, that solution. It was not much of a solution.
When the sun’s early light enters the room, Sushila rises, her limbs stiff. She walks into the kitchen, sits down at the table with pen and paper. She has a letter to write.
THE CHILD’S FEVER BREAKS, AND MARY FINALLY SLEEPS A FULL night through again. The doctor gives all the credit to their devoted nursing, and the nuns are pleased with themselves. The baby cuddles content against Mary’s breast; Mary’s smile stretches across her face even in sleep. Her teeth shine, white and beautiful against her dark face. The youngest nun looks in on her and thinks that this is how Christ himself must have looked, as he rested, after battling the devil’s temptation for forty days and nights in the barren desert. But she knows to keep that particular blasphemous thought to herself, and walks away singing a Gloria softly, under her breath.
THE MOTHER RECEIVES THE YOUNG COUPLE GRACIOUSLY; AS THE door closes behind them, the whispers start among the nuns. How handsome they are! See how fair their skin! Does the baby have his eyes? Is he a husband? A brother?
Mary sleeps soundly through the morning, through the hours that the couple spends closeted with the Mother. When the three finally emerge, they walk down the long white hall to her room, together. At the door, they see Mary and the baby, sleeping. Sushila steps forward and
touches Mary gently on the shoulder. She wakes at once and at the sight of her sister begins to moan. The moan rises, louder and louder, into a panicked, broken wail. The nuns clustered in the hall move to defend, but the Mother stops them with an outstretched iron arm.
Sundar steps in, looks at his wife. Looks at Mary. Then he reaches forward and takes the baby from her limp arms. He turns away, cradling the child, tears bright in his eyes. He turns and walks out. Sushila brushes a few strands of hair from Mary’s forehead, then turns as well, following her husband, leaving her sister behind, to the nuns’ gentle care. She does not weep, but in the next few weeks, she is never more than a few steps away from her husband, her son.
The wails eventually lessen to low moans, almost inaudible. A day comes when Mary goes back to working in the garden. She does not smile, and she never does speak. The nuns continue to speculate, to conjecture, but though they discuss this for the rest of her life, invent a thousand different stories, they will never know the truth of it. They will never even come close.
A dark girl, married off. Love, unexpected, and a child. A terrible disease, deaths. A sister, beautiful and fair, married off. A baby, a wet-nurse. A gift, a theft. Flight from a garden. A desperate search; a weeping man. The lost, found. Two women, lost.
The Kandiahs
The Princess in the Forest
Chicago, 1955
It is always summer in the forest. The sun shines down through the tall trees, the leaves of spreading banyan and coconut palm. Monkeys race from limb to limb, hanging precariously by single arm or leg; parakeets swoop and glide, silhouetted for dark moments against the brightness of sky.
The princess walks for hours, her face smooth as an undisturbed pool of water, her eyes laughing, light as butterflies. Newly married, full of adoration for her husband, her prince. Rama hunts in the forest; he pursues the slender hart, lays traps for cunning rabbits. But always he comes to his Sita before the sun is down, comes to their modest hut, their gentle home in exile. He smiles to see her, lays the game aside and takes her in his arms, draws her down to the forest floor, the soft grasses, and she loves him then, as the gopis loved blue Krishna, she loves him with everything she has, everything she is.
“SHANTHI—YOU’LL BE LATE!” HER HUSBAND SCOLDS FROM THE kitchen doorway, their youngest daughter tucked under one arm, a book nestled in the other. Three days a week he watches the children, the days he doesn’t teach, so that they can spend that time with a parent instead of with the hired black nanny. Shanthi doesn’t know how he can read and mind the girls at the same time; she can’t even think when she’s with them. She can’t understand now what had possessed her to keep having children, one after another, until there were six small heads to be tucked into bed. It was only after giving birth to Lakshmi that she had finally come to her senses.
Shanthi had told Aravindan that she would have no more children, that as soon as Lakshmi was weaned, she wanted to find a job. She had been ready with her arguments—had expected that she would have to win her husband over, talk him around. None of the other professors’ wives worked. But she was different; she was smart, special. Shanthi had left Ceylon at nineteen, had attended graduate school at Oxford, one of very few women admitted. She possessed a doctorate in physics from Oxford—even though it was now a decade out of date, surely someone would hire her to teach. Shanthi had been unaccountably angry when Aravindan hadn’t given her a chance to use her readied arguments, had only placidly agreed to her proposal.
Lately, even his gentlest words have driven her into a fury.
“I’m going, I’m going. I can’t find my gloves. Where’s my coat? What did you do with it?” She’s frenzied, stomping from one room to the next, looking behind overstuffed leather chairs, under sofa cushions.
“Your coat’s in the closet; I hung it up. The gloves are in the left pocket.” Lakshmi has fallen asleep against Aravindan’s shoulder, soothed by the solidity of his thick body. She is four now, too old to be carried around on her father’s arm, but she has been a strange, slow child from the beginning, and Aravindan doesn’t seem to mind the extra attention she needs.
Shanthi should be grateful for his care for the children, for her, but a wave of resentment sweeps through her instead, at the criticism implied. It isn’t fair, but she can’t help it. Should she be grateful that the important University of Chicago professor allows his wife to work, takes time out of his busy day so that she can teach at the high school for money they don’t need? Other wives would be grateful; her own mother would tell her to thank Mother Mary for such a saint of a husband, and would then scold her for not spending more time at home, taking good care of such a kind, brilliant man.
“You’ll have to reheat the rice and curries from yesterday; I need to meet with a parent after school; I’ll be home late.” Instead of feeling grateful, Shanthi takes a small, petty pleasure in making Aravindan eat old food, a pleasure somehow more intense because she knows he would not have noticed if she hadn’t pointed it out. And without a kiss, or another word, she pulls on the coat, storms down the hallway and out the door, not bothering to button the buttons or pull on her gloves, taking satisfaction in the winter wind that will undoubtedly give her a cold before nightfall. Let Aravindan work a little harder the next few days. It will be good for him.
In the evenings, Rama cleans and dresses the game; Sita slices wild onions, cooks savory curries and coconut roti over a small fire. They each have their appointed tasks and perform them together, companionably, in perfect harmony. The prince’s brother arrives, just before the meal is ready. Lakshman is a lazy thing; he rarely brings anything to add to the pot. What does he do in the forest, all day long? There is nowhere to go, no one to see.
They have been in the forest for days, weeks, years. They have been in exile so long that the princess has forgotten what it is to see a familiar face, a face other than that of her husband or his brother. Sita has only monkeys for company, who screech and gibber in the day, in the night, endless in their complaints. With wide faces and brazen eyes, they follow her as she moves barefoot through her days, her crimson wedding sari (all she owns in this exile) like a slender flame in the forest. The monkeys do not worry her; she is a princess, after all, and her husband is a prince. She has nothing to fear from monkeys.
But his brother watches too, with eyes wide and shameless. Rama is oblivious, will think no evil of his brother. But Sita knows; she feels it. His heated gaze strips the silk from her skin, leaving her naked and trembling.
SHANTHI CANNOT PAY ANY ATTENTION TO THE WHITE MAN, THE concerned father who sits across from her desk. There was a time when Shanthi would have worried about a student of hers who was doing so poorly, would have taken extra trouble, extra time to tutor the child. In her first year of teaching, she’d been so grateful to be out of the house, away from the endless rounds of washing diapers and cooking dishes (two sets—one spicy for her husband, one mild for the children), that she’d thrown all her frustrated mental energy into her students. But the endless weeks, one after another, teaching the same things to the same slow minds—it was just as bad as diapers. What they called algebra, geometry—it was only arithmetic, really. It wasn’t anything that stretched her mind, made her feel like she was actually doing something interesting, worthwhile, important. Only the novelty had made it seem an improvement over diapers and dishes.
As the man drones on about his errant daughter, Shanthi slips into her familiar daydream, the epic story her own father had told her, at night, as she fell asleep. He had filled her head with stories of brave Rama, his beloved wife Sita, loyal Lakshman. As a child, Shanthi had believed every word, had absorbed them as she slowly fell asleep. Her father had sat under the mosquito netting with her, smoothed sweat-damp hair from Shanthi’s forehead in the heat of the Colombo summer. He’d even fanned her with a handy piece of paper so that she could fall asleep, the paper invariably scribbled over with math. It was from her father that Shanthi had learned to love math and physics,
the clean sense of their underlying structures. He had taught his youngest daughter as a game, an amusement, at first. But she had been quick to learn, eager for the challenge; he had become caught up in her excitement, ignoring her mother’s protestations, until the day when Shanthi stepped on the boat for England. Only then did she see the stricken realization in his eyes, that everything he had taught her had only served to send her away from him. She had wanted to tell him that fathers always lost their daughters in the end, but she hadn’t had the words.
He had gotten sick in the midst of the war, while she was away at school. Mail, already slow, had been disrupted by the war; letters took months longer than normal to traverse the long distances. He had died before her letter back had arrived; she had heedlessly offered to come home, though there was no guarantee that she could even find someone to carry her back across the dark waters. Aravindan had already proposed by then, and Shanthi had accepted, though she had not yet had the courage to write to her father, to tell him that she had met a man, had fallen in love, that she wasn’t coming home, not yet. And then it was too late. Would her father have wanted her to marry Aravindan, to move with him to his new job in America? Would he have worried about her, as this father worries about his own daughter?
The poor student’s plight is not enough to focus Shanthi’s attention—now she considers the body of the white man sitting across from her, at a student’s desk. His long legs fit awkwardly under the low desktop, and Shanthi wonders what he would look like if he could stretch out properly. On a low sofa, perhaps, or a broad bed. He stares fixedly at her, and she wonders what he sees. A brown woman who should better know her place? Or does he see an exotic beauty, a princess from the storybooks? After six children, she is no longer slender, but her breasts are full, her broad hips might seem appealing. Shanthi is a respectable woman, a professor’s wife, a Catholic. She would never accede to any invitation. But she does wonder what it would be like to be looked at, to be desired again by hot and feverish eyes—that, she imagines, would be satisfying. That would be some compensation.
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