by Leah Franqui
Vinod would never have let her be alone with another man, a stranger to him, for hours on end the way Dhruv allowed Rachel to be. He would have worried about what it looked like, about who was watching. And he would have worried about someone’s seducing her, driving her away from him. Well, she had done that all on her own, hadn’t she?
Swati was, for the first time, as free of monitoring as all those other women, the ones she saw on the street, walking alone, alone, in a way that Swati had never been, never been allowed to be, in a way she had gone so long without that she now feared it. What would it be like to walk out alone, into the day? To know that her actions affected no one but herself, to not worry about what people were thinking?
But she would never do that. She might walk out, yes, but she would never stop worrying about other people. It was as much a part of her as the nose on her face. She could not meet Arjun, even just to be polite, even if she ignored all the things that were supposed to have happened and just had a visit. No matter that he had done his wife so wrong; she would still worry about what he thought of her. How lucky to be a man and not feel shame for what people thought of you.
She prepared another cup of tea and realized it was the second Thursday of the month, the day her kitty party, hers and Bunny’s, met back in Kolkata. Oh, how she had looked forward to these Thursday kitties each month, spending a long lunch with a large group of other women, gossiping, chatting, each hoping to win the kitty they had contributed a few rupees to so they could buy something without their husband’s knowledge or approval. But now, thinking about all those women meeting together, Bunny revealing everything, sent a spear of dread down her spine. How they would enjoy her scandal, Swati thought grimly. How it would be a subject they could return to again and again, dissect and analyze for weeks, use as a warning for all, an icon of what not to do, who not to be. Hadn’t she, Swati, done the same thing? When the Goyals had a suicide in their family, when the Birlas had a nephew who had moved to Australia and declared he was gay, when the Mittals had lost all their money because one of the uncles was addicted to gambling, she had discussed all that with her kitty party friends, she had nodded and judged and expressed a thousand opinions, all based on nothing but biases and assumptions and a sense of moral superiority. Well, now it was her turn.
“Good morning,” Rachel said, her voice scratchy with sleep. She stood in the doorway of her bedroom, stretching her arms above her head. She wore a shirt with thin straps and a pair of shorts, and as she stretched two inches of her stomach revealed themselves. If Swati had ever worn something half so revealing in front of her own in-laws, she would have humiliated them, and herself. Swati had never even owned something like that, never even thought about buying it, for the shame she knew it would bring everyone.
But Rachel looked comfortable and cool in the hot morning, and Swati suddenly felt sad, sad that her comfort had always come second to propriety, to what was expected, to making other people comfortable. She wouldn’t want to swan around in tank tops and shorts like Rachel did, no, she wouldn’t have wanted that even forty years ago, but a light nightgown, a sleeveless top, something that would have let her move, let her body breathe—that she would have liked. That she wanted, even today.
Swati had never thought much about her clothing. She had worn what she was told to wear, what others around her wore, what elders approved of. She had not drooled over spangle-covered saris from films like her friends, like Bunny, or seen things in stores and lusted after them. She had adopted her current style because it seemed appropriate to her age and body. It was what other women her age wore, so she wore it. She looked down at her salwar kameez, its heavy work and long sleeves in a synthetic material suddenly feeling stifling.
“Good morning. Would you like a paratha?”
“I didn’t hear Geeta come in.” Rachel looked around.
“No, not yet. I was going to cook.”
Rachel looked surprised. “You never cook,” Rachel said, making her way into the kitchen and starting to prepare her morning coffee. She did this in what she had told Swati was called a French press, a delicate glass cylinder that Rachel had to keep replacing, as Deeti, the maid, had broken it twice trying to clean it. Rachel filled a pot with filtered water and lit the burner, then busied herself fetching the coffee, which she ground freshly each morning, filling the apartment with noise and scent.
“I cook.” Swati disliked cooking, she always had, but she did know how to make some things—she had had to learn in anticipation of her marriage—and she was hungry. Besides, it might be nice to feed Rachel, who never had any of Geeta’s food, some good home dishes.
“Do I like paratha? I don’t know if I do,” Rachel said, measuring coffee into the French press.
It was pleasant, to be with Rachel in the kitchen this way, to move around each other, to work in tandem and yet separately. The moments like this Swati had had with her own mother-in-law had been few. The kitchen at home had been a small, cramped space, built for servants and wives, accounting for the comfort or enjoyment of neither. When she had arrived in Dhruv’s apartment, she had been unhappy with the open kitchen, worried that the sight and smell of cooking food would make others in the apartment uncomfortable, but there was never anyone there to see the cook prepare anything anyway, and Swati had to admit, it made the light very nice having everything so open.
“I make one with papaya. You will like it,” Swati said, pulling out the flour and the raw green fruit.
“We have papaya?” Rachel said, smiling. “I had no idea.”
Swati held it up.
“Oh. It’s a different shape. And it’s so green. I thought that was some kind of gourd,” Rachel said, pouring boiling water into the coffee grounds.
The smell was sharp and roasted, and Swati, who had never drunk much coffee, felt her senses buzz. She wondered if Rachel would give her some, in exchange for the paratha. Perhaps they could barter, she thought with a smile, as she mixed flour and water with an expert hand. Rachel watched her, the girl’s eyes wide, taking in every movement.
“What are you watching?”
“You do that so well. I love that. Watching people’s muscle memory take over,” Rachel explained.
“Muscle memory?”
“Like, your body just knows what to do. It becomes so used to a task that your muscles have a sense of what to do, almost without your brain getting involved. Your body can physically remember how to do a task, actually. I love watching it anywhere, but especially when people cook. My grandmother used to bake bread, and it lived in her hands, the way to knead it. I would watch her like this. It’s like seeing a great sculptor or something, seeing that certainty in the body.”
“Surely not so important,” Swati said. Food was just food, wasn’t it?
Rachel shrugged. “It’s important to me. It’s important to most people, right? Just because it’s universal doesn’t mean it’s not important. In fact, that sort of means it is important. Food is life. At least, I think so.”
Swati thought about that as she kneaded the dough, her fingers and the palms of her hands so used to the movement that even though it had been months since she had done it, she knew just what to do.
“Could be,” Swati said, unwilling to commit herself further than that.
Rachel smiled. “Is,” she said.
“Do you have to go give your voice today?” Swati said, her palms sinking into the rhythm of the dish easily. She liked making parathas, they were the only thing she really liked to make. Maybe because of what Rachel had said, her body just took over. She started grating the papaya.
“I have a break, waiting for the other people to catch up to me. I’m too fast,” Rachel said, shaking her head.
“I’m not surprised,” Swati said. Everything Rachel did was quick.
“Really? But I do so little here,” Rachel said, her voice catching a bit. Swati was surprised. Rachel was so busy, so full of energy, to her. “I feel like my life is happening in slow moti
on. And just as Dhruv’s is speeding up. I called him last night, he was out with Vinod.”
Swati nodded. Her heart hurt a little, thinking of her son with Vinod, but she was also happy. The last thing she wanted was for her choice to impact Dhruv’s relationship with his father. It was good if they were spending time together and happy.
Catching a small piece of dough to roll into a round, flat shape, she studied Rachel. Rachel seemed sad, and she had invited Swati out the previous day when Swati was sad; perhaps she should return the favor.
“Would you like to go shopping with me?” Swati asked.
“Oh, I don’t know . . .” Rachel said, shaking her head.
“You just said you do nothing. And I would like your advice on clothing,” Swati told her, trying not to plead. It wasn’t just for Rachel that she was doing this. She didn’t want to be alone. Bunny’s voice would ring in her head; she needed Rachel to block it out. She didn’t want the temptation of the Starbucks, so close that she herself knew where it was. If she stayed in the apartment, she would want to go, to see Arjun, to ask about his mother, to get a glimpse of Kolkata in his face. And besides, she and Rachel were becoming closer, or at least Swati hoped that this was true. And there was no one else for Swati to be close to here.
“Why is that, exactly?” Rachel asked, sounding curious and dry.
“I would like to buy something more . . . more . . . Western. Something that is not so, uh, something that fits differently on me,” Swati said, scrambling. But even as she made up the claim, she realized it was rather true. She would like something new, something different. Something that made her look as light and free as she felt. The kinds of things she had told herself she didn’t want to wear all those years ago. A pair of jeans, perhaps, a nightgown without sleeves, a blouse that dipped below her collarbones. The sorts of things her in-laws wouldn’t have approved of, the sorts of things she had never thought she might wear. The sorts of things Rachel wore every day, but more suited to Swati. Without Rachel there, she might end up getting exactly what she always did.
“Are you trying to say something sluttier?” Rachel said, her eyes wide, her tone offended.
“No, no, I—”
“I’m kidding,” Rachel said, her eyes dancing. “Okay. I will come with you. Is this so you can hit the club, or—”
“I don’t belong to any clubs here,” Swati said, confused. They only had a membership in Kolkata.
Rachel rolled her eyes. “A dance club. A . . . a . . . disco,” Rachel explained. Swati blushed. She had seen dance clubs only in the movies, from when she was a young girl and they really had been discos, in the height of Kolkata’s time as a hip place for music and young people, to the modern thumping, pumping places they were now, where stars like Alia Bhatt and Katrina Kaif shimmied their way into the arms of potential husbands like electric eels. But the idea of her own body inside of one seemed ridiculous, laughable, insane.
“I was kidding. Again,” Rachel said, pouring herself some coffee. “I think your paratha is burning.” Swati snatched it off the pan and surveyed it. One side was, sadly, charred.
“That was yours,” Swati said as she added more ghee to the pan and began again, focusing this time.
“Show me what to do,” Rachel said, leaning her hip against the counter.
“Why?” Swati said. Rachel didn’t eat this food all that much. Why should she want to learn?
“Well, I mean, it’s something different. It’s a new skill. And if I like it, then I can make myself one next time,” Rachel said.
“And if you don’t?”
“Then I know what not to do,” Rachel said, smiling. “Teach me.”
Swati looked at her. No one had ever asked Swati to show them anything before. She had told maids what she wanted done, she had given orders, but she had never passed on knowledge to anyone. She had not thought she had much of anything to pass on.
“What is in the paratha? Start there,” Rachel said helpfully.
“Well, first you, you grate the papaya, then, I add some ginger, this much, and . . .” Swati went on to describe what she had done as she stuffed the dough with some of the filling and patted it into the right shape. She soon had a perfectly cooked paratha, loaded with shredded green papaya and dripping with ghee, on a plate. She held it out to Rachel, who looked up from where she had been taking notes on the process on her phone, and then pulled it back the second the girl reached for it. “If I can try your coffee.”
“You drive a hard bargain,” Rachel said, pouring her out a cup.
“Naturally. I’m Marwari, after all.”
Several hours later, Swati was convinced that her desire that morning to change her wardrobe had been a moment of pure madness. She had wanted to go to Westside, to try on kurtas and trousers, but Rachel had pointed out that there was nothing particularly different about that, really, so why bother? And they might as well go somewhere they could access lots of shops and have lunch, so they had landed up at a mall, where Rachel had become a whirlwind of activity, picking out tops and jeans and skirts that exposed parts of Swati’s body that had never been seen in daylight before.
Now Swati stood in the changing room of a shop called Label, on the third floor of one of Mumbai’s bright and shiny shopping malls, all glitz and glamour and a population of shoppers half her age, and wanted to cry. A pile of clothing, all picked out by Rachel for her, slumped sadly in the corner, untested. In her white, drab underwear and bra, Swati stood sagging under the fluorescent lights and thought about something she rarely thought about: her body.
Swati had never thought much about herself, her form. She had been married so young, and she had spent so much of her life veiling her body from men, making sure that she didn’t provoke, didn’t offend, didn’t cause comment, that she rarely thought about things like her breasts, her hips, her legs. Vinod hadn’t cared much about the way she dressed, only that it be decent, and in that they were united. He had liked for her to look nice, as it signaled their prosperity, and he hadn’t liked the color orange, on her or anyone, but that had been the end of his opinions. During the period of time in which they were still engaging in marital relations, they had seen a movie in which the heroine had worn a thin-strapped nightgown, and Vinod had picked one up for her, but when she had worn it, he hadn’t looked at her any differently, had simply lifted it and gone about his business with the same short-lived vigor of all their nightly encounters.
She hadn’t thought much when she got married about whether Vinod wanted her, desired her. It hadn’t seemed important. But if the nightgown had been an attempt for him to desire her more, it had clearly failed both of them. When she had asked him later why he had bought it, he had said he thought it was the kind of thing she would want to have. And he had always wanted to see a woman in something like that close up. But he never asked her to wear it again, and she gave it to the maid a year later. By that point, they hadn’t slept together in months.
She had, she thought, packed up her feelings about her body with her memories of her youth. But now she was thinking about it all over again. All that fabric that she had thought of as heavy and restrictive that morning upon seeing Rachel in her pajamas had a purpose, she remembered now as she surveyed herself critically. It covered. Swathed in meters and meters of good fabric, any woman’s body became secondary to the cloth that surrounded it. Stripped of the familiar folds, the embroidery and beadwork, what was left but the body itself? As she tried on piece after piece, it struck her how odd it was to see her body, which had always looked a certain way, in new forms, with new shapes covering it, revealing more of it, hugging it close and advertising its flaws and virtues to the world. Her once-slim hips had been coated with a layer of fat from bearing Dhruv, from comforting pakoras, from sugary teas and inactive afternoons. Her breasts were larger than they had been in her youth, and her arms were narrow but soft. She was different than she had been as a young woman, but she was not, she thought, so very old as she had once thought.
And yet she worried, was it obscene to show herself this way, in clothing made for women far younger than her? What would Vinod have thought? But how did that matter, how had it ever mattered, when had he really cared? He had tricked himself into thinking they had a loving marriage without really thinking much about her at all. She couldn’t use him as an excuse not to try something new. And yet the thought of her body, out in the world in a new way, terrified her.
“All right in there?” Rachel’s voice sailed over the dressing room door, cutting through Swati’s dismay.
“I don’t think any of this is very nice,” Swati said doubtfully.
“It doesn’t look good?”
“I don’t, I don’t know if it will,” Swati said, her voice faint. She wrapped her arms around herself, holding on to her own body. Was this an act of madness? Perhaps she should just leave and forget any of this idea.
“Well, you’ll never know until you try,” said Rachel in a singsong voice. “Something my mom always says.”
“What does she like to wear?” Swati asked, curious. Rachel didn’t speak about her parents much. Of course, she hadn’t really asked, Swati realized.
It was the custom of a girl in India to become the property of her husband’s family when she married, to erase her old life, to be more loyal to her in-laws than the people who had raised her. It didn’t really matter where a girl came from, what she had left behind. Her duty was to fit into her new home, her new family. Swati had always found that painful, but it seemed she had subscribed to it nevertheless, ignoring the fact that Rachel had a family, asking little about their lives. If they had been Indian, she, Swati, would have been connected to them in an essential way; they would have been family, to be given gifts at festivals, to be honored and judged, a link that would have been set in stone. She would have known a little more about them, at least. But their distance, and their foreignness, had rendered them irrelevant in those ways.