by Manil Suri
Roopa is looking at me, and I realize Dev has greeted me but I have not responded. “Hello,” I murmur, and then add, “Congratulations.”
“Your sister is almost as pretty as you are,” Dev says to Roopa, or to me, I am not sure. Then, to my amazement, your father leans forward and kisses my sister with his red, red lips.
YOUR FATHER STILL has the hair snaking up his chest. He rubs it against me whenever he wants to let me know he has the need. Sometimes, when he lies on top of me, I can hear it rustling against my skin. Perhaps you heard it as well from inside me, with your ear pressed to the wall of my belly.
Soon your father will stop singing in the living room. He will forget the custard and leave the dishes where they are. He will stretch back in his chair and stare at the ceiling, his mouth open. His eyes will close—he will snore, and think he is still awake.
I will smooth out the sheets on his bed next to mine. I will spread out your blanket and lay you on his empty bed. With my cheek on my pillow, I will watch you sleep beside me. My eyes will close following the rise and fall of your chest.
Sometime before dawn your father will be awakened by the heat. He will pull off his shirt and clear the magazines off the sofa. He will stretch himself out and fold up his shirt for a pillow. He will sleep with the naag hugged to his body.
You will wake, too, and cry to be fed. My eyes will open, and I will put you to my breast. Afterwards, I will lay you down again on your father’s bed. I will try to get some more sleep before the night ends.
In the morning, I will boil the milk delivered by the ganga. I will throw away the pickle and put the dishes in the basin. I will make no noise, and your father will not awaken.
I will look at your father and think of you. I will wonder if you will have his voice, sing as well. I will imagine your body growing, your muscles firming. The naag beginning to sprout upon your chest too.
chapter two
SOMEHOW, I ALWAYS RETURN TO THAT 1955 REPUBLIC DAY EVE IN DELHI when I first saw your father. I wonder what my life would have been if I hadn’t gone to the concert with Roopa. If I had not allowed her to drag me backstage. If I had not heard your father say those words. “Your sister is almost as pretty as you are.” Every time I asked him afterwards, he said he couldn’t remember which one of us he meant.
When did the idea first start germinating in my brain? Was it when I saw Roopa whistle at him during the show? When I saw the look that came on her face backstage? “Your sister is almost as pretty as you are.” I had never heard anyone say that before to me. Neither had Roopa, to her.
Or was it after the contest, when we all went to the market at Chandni Chowk to stand on the street and eat fruit mix from one of the century-old shops? When Roopa kept insisting on feeding Dev herself, picking up the chunks of spice-doused banana and sweet potato with her toothpick and ostentatiously transporting them to his mouth? All around us, eyes widened at her brazenness, foreheads rumpled in disapproval, voices chittered at the shamelessness of youth. “Should I sprinkle on more chili powder?” Roopa asked Dev, and I could see the flush on her face from the looks she pretended not to notice.
“Meera doesn’t like pineapple,” Dev said, nodding at the leaf spread out on my palm, which was bare except for the small yellow pyramid of pineapple I had arranged on the side with my toothpick. He was smiling at me, and as I watched, his mouth opened in expectation of the next morsel from Roopa. What would happen if I speared a piece from my pyramid and raised it to his lips? Would I also be able to bask in the heat of the scandalized stares?
“She’s always been the fussy one in the family,” Roopa declared, annoyed that Dev’s attention had strayed. She rummaged around in her fruit for a pineapple chunk to pop into his mouth and glared at me when she couldn’t find one. “If you weren’t going to eat it, why didn’t you tell the man no pineapple, instead of erecting the Taj Mahal on your leaf with everyone’s share?”
“I was saving it for the end,” I said, picking up a piece and chewing it with relish for Roopa’s benefit. “It’s very sweet,” I told her, then added cheekily, “Should I give you some? For Dev?”
Roopa’s eyes flashed, but her words were lost in a blast of January wind that swept through the lane. It had rained the night before, and the cold had a penetrating dampness to it that made us tighten the grip of our fingertips around our toothpicks. I watched the stripes billow on Dev’s thin sweater, the kind with the sky blue V-neck which was being touted by street vendors all over Delhi as this year’s fashion imported directly from London. Dev stood facing the gusts, his shirt open casually up to the second button, as if he were a tennis player at Wimbledon positioning himself in a breeze on a hot summer day. “Are you cold?” he asked, as Roopa and I pulled at our shawls, trying to eke out enough material to cover our heads. “I could give someone my sweater.”
I was almost taken in. But then as he spoke about moving to Bombay to become a playback singer for films, I noticed how his jaw tensed to keep his teeth from chattering. “Roopa says she couldn’t possibly leave Delhi, but I dream about it all the time. Imagine living down there next to the warmth of the sea, imagine never needing a shawl or sweater again.” He dug his arms in tightly against his lean frame to maintain the nonchalance of his pose as he said this. How endearing it was, I thought, that underneath his bravado, he too was freezing.
Roopa wanted to buy cosmetics, so we walked down towards the fort, looking for the side street with the perfume shops. Everywhere was the smell of charcoal fires, mingling with the aroma of food being fried on giant iron griddles. The air was so heavy with smoke that it looked grainy, lights from the shops swirled and bled as though through a fog. Tiny paper flags sprouted from the ends of wooden sticks everywhere, like early spring blossoms heralding the arrival of Republic Day. Decorations for the celebration had been becoming more elaborate since the original one in 1950, and this year there were strings of bulbs festooned between the lampposts along the street. Just this morning, the newspapers had talked about how the wounds of partitioning the country into India and Pakistan were finally healing after eight years, how Hindus and Muslims all over the Indian side were ready to put the riots and the killings of the past aside and greet a united future.
“Look at the fort,” Dev said, pointing at the arches that rose from the twilight ahead. “They say that Shah Jehan employed a hundred musicians, to play in the drum house five times a day. That’s the time I should have lived, in the days of the Mughals. When people like me were hired in the royal courts, when the soul of a singer was something even kings could appreciate.”
I imagined Shah Jehan and his empress Mumtaz reclining at dusk in the fort on the cushioned interior of the Sheesh Mahal. Dev’s lyrics ushering in the evening candles one by one, each flame igniting a thousand images in the mirrors embedded in the ceiling and walls.
“All these centuries later, and everything still stands, just like the Mughals built it,” Dev said. “They’ve come and gone, the British, and these buildings will outlast us all.”
The first time I saw the Red Fort was just before the Partition, when I was nine. My family had left behind the ancestral mansion in Rawalpindi, once it became clear the city would fall to Pakistan, and fled to Delhi. Paji took us to a different neighborhood every day to familiarize us with our new home. Darya Ganj, the part of Old Delhi in which we resettled, was filled with narrow streets and crowded bazaars. In comparison, New Delhi, with its wide boulevards and enormous edifices, was so different, it might as well have been London or New York. The immaculate white pillars and polished arcades of Connaught Circus had projected a symmetry, an order, that was unsettling. Biji in particular was so intimidated that she rarely ventured out of Old Delhi after that.
What I remembered most vividly about the Red Fort from back then was the Union Jack flapping atop a pole, its stern geometry of triangles and crosses clashing with the delicate intricacy of the minarets and arches. In its stead now flew the Indian flag, the centuries-old A
shoka wheel at its center forming a bridge between the Hindu strand of saffron and the Muslim strand of green. A new united India, we had been taught, with a unified identity for the future.
“We should come again tomorrow, to see the fireworks,” Roopa said, as we watched workers hoist large cloth portraits of Gandhiji and Nehru on either side of the Lahore Gate for a special celebration the next evening. “A full lakh of rupees they’re supposed to be spending, to celebrate the five-year mark.”
Floodlights started coming on all round the fort, bathing the sandstone in patriotic cascades of white and green and orange. “Testing, testing,” someone said over a loudspeaker. Then Nehru’s voice crackled through the air, reprising his 1947 Independence Day speech. “The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future?” I noticed Roopa rub her wrist across the stripes of Dev’s sweater, then slide her hand under his.
It seems bizarre to blame Nehru for my life, but I think it was his words that helped egg me on towards my fate. Listening to him made me start wondering what my own future would hold for me, whom would I be spending it with. What were my opportunities, dangling ripe and heavy within reach, waiting to be plucked? I stood there, absorbing the bustle and tinsel of the street, as men with scarves wound around their faces bicycled by. Looming ahead was the imposing façade of the fort with its neat rows of windows and doorways and the flag undulating lazily from a pole. Beyond stretched the vast rising expanse of the sky, as smooth and unmarked as a sheet of parchment dipped in ink. “…The past is over and it is the future that beckons to us now,” Nehru declared.
What story did I plan to inscribe across the blank expanse of my own future? Already, my parents had started inviting the families of prospective bridegrooms to come over and inspect Roopa. Even though I was two years younger, Biji, savvy to every marketing possibility, found some pretext to trot me out as well at every such occasion. “My second daughter, Meera. A bit more time, and you’ll see her blossom into another Roopa, just you wait.” It was quite possible that she might have us both married off within the year, before I even had a chance to get to college, before I could experience any of the adventures I had dreamt about or seen on the screen. I felt something clutch at my heart. Roopa never tired of boasting about her college flirtations, the boys she had met even before the poetry evening where she was introduced to Dev. When would it be my turn for romance?
A small sigh escaped Roopa’s throat and I turned around to see Dev brush his lips against her fingers. My sister’s eyes were closed, and her head slightly tilted back, as if she had just surrendered herself to the comfort of a particularly soft and luxurious pillow. I looked at Dev’s mouth, at the incipient shadow of his mustache, at the half smile playing at his lips. (From the fleeting contact with my sister’s fingers, perhaps?) Under the crest of his chin, a streak of makeup still gleamed unwashed on his neck, like a luminous brushstroke of silver painted across the darkness of his skin. “A new star arises, the star of freedom in the East, a new hope comes into being, a vision long cherished materializes,” Nehru said, and I suddenly realized that Dev’s eyes were open, that his gaze was focused on my face, that he had been observing me while I examined him.
Then the electricity failed, Nehru’s voice was squelched mid-sentence, and the great architectural works of the Mughals around us were plunged into darkness.
“DOES PAJI KNOW ABOUT DEV?” It was later that night, and we were alone at home. Paji was on an overnight trip, and Biji had seized the opportunity to drag our younger sister Sharmila to be blessed by a holy man in Dhaula Kuan to make her teeth grow out straight. Roopa sat in front of the mirror in Biji’s room, rummaging through the cosmetics she had picked up (in the light of a hurricane lamp) from Chandni Chowk.
“Have some sense,” she said, looking at me scornfully. “Would I be sitting here alive if he did?”
“You’ll have to tell if you marry Dev.”
“Who said anything about marriage?” Roopa scoffed. “His father is some sort of railway employee at Nizamuddin station. Can you imagine us on the platform waving flags at the Frontier Mail?”
She found the bottle she was looking for and held it up. “See this? It’s proper rouge. Imported. Not that horrible red paste from Ajmer that the Christian ayahs smear on their cheeks.”
“Oh please, could we try it on my face?” Rouge was the cosmetic Biji abhorred the most, denouncing it as something only fit for the faces of whores and English housewives. Biji considered all makeup immoral, and only owned a single stick of red lipstick herself. She used this not to color her lips, but to form perfectly round bindis on her forehead for special occasions.
“I don’t know,” Roopa said, examining my features with a professional air. “Your cheeks are too coarse—and besides, it’s much too expensive to waste against your dark skin.”
I had heard things like this so many times from her that it did not bother me. Everyone agreed that Roopa was the one with the film-star looks, the fairer, more radiant skin. Despite the compliments, my sister could still not resist an opportunity to cut me down a notch, to bolster this claim.
“What if I promise not to tell Paji about Dev if you make me up?”
Roopa gasped. “Why you little witch. I’m the one who took you there and now you’re threatening me? What are you, so jealous, just because you can’t get a boyfriend?”
“I can, too, if I want. I’m just too young.”
“You’re seventeen. Two years less than I am. That’s not young. No, it’s because you’re too ugly, that’s why. So ugly that your own mother sent you back to the village after you were born so she wouldn’t have to look at you.”
It had happened after they brought me home from my grandmother’s. Roopa had taken one look at me and run away, terrified. She dropped to the floor unconscious the next morning when she saw my mouth at Biji’s breast. Two days after I arrived, Roopa curled her body into a ball and refused to allow herself to be fed.
Biji became alarmed at the looming prospect—losing her first-born in exchange for her second. Roopa had good teeth, sturdy limbs, and filled the house with joy. I, on the other hand, was still mottled from the delivery and only opened my mouth to cry. The choice was clear—it was not as if I was a boy.
So the next morning, Biji packed me with my clothes back into my cradle and had the servant summoned to return me to the village where I had been delivered. There I was to stay for several months, becoming less ugly as I grew, until it was determined I would no longer traumatize poor Roopa.
By the time Sharmila was born, Roopa had become more used to babies. Or perhaps Sharmila looked prettier than I. In any case, Roopa did not cry, and Sharmila was not sent back to become less ugly. Instead, it was I who did the howling, every time I saw Sharmila’s face. But Biji was unmoved by my tears. Sharmila stayed.
It wasn’t just Biji who doted on Roopa. Paji called her his “English daughter,” so fair that the midwife must have lifted her from a pram in the British cantonment nearby. “You’ll light up your father’s name, be a doctor or scientist someday.” He insisted on feeding her every night with his own hand. Roopa would sit at his right and accept offerings of food and fruit with the self-satisfied benevolence of an idol at a temple.
So entrenched was the rule in our household that Roopa be favored in everything that the question of opposing it didn’t arise. It would have made as much sense as rebelling against a law of nature—against gravity or the course of the monsoon. Sharmila and I wore Roopa’s old clothes and played with her discarded toys without complaint, we called her “Bhenji” since using her name would show disrespect, and we obeyed (or disobeyed) her decrees as we would those of a parent.
Today, though, I was not going to let Bhenji get away with calling me ugly. “Your Dev thinks I’m pretty,” I said, and was rewarded by the annoyance that f
lared up in her face.
In the end, Roopa relented and made me up, though she purposely put on too much rouge, making my cheeks as bright as candy. I looked at my face, squinting to compensate not only for the rouge, but also the eyebrow pencil, with which Roopa had outlined my eyes so vehemently that they stared back as if out of a cartoon drawn by a child. But it didn’t really matter. I had finally blossomed, as Biji had predicted, and someone else had been able to see it. I, too, was beautiful now—Roopa was no longer the only one.
So beautiful, that the idea, at last fully articulated, at last fully engorged with possibility and churning with ambition, engulfed me like a wave. I could win Dev. I could steal him from Roopa, making up for all the years of favoritism my parents had showered her with. I could reach out and pluck my very own apple, bite through its russet gold skin, taste its sweet sensual flesh, before it was too late. All his smiles and glances suggested Dev was someone attainable—besides, who else was there in my circle to target as a possible candidate? Hadn’t the prime minister of India, Nehru himself, nudged me in the direction I was planning to take?
I imagine the electricity going out again in Chandni Chowk, but this time there is no commotion as the lights fade. This time, the darkness magically swallows Roopa before she can use its cover to thrust herself against Dev. He stands behind me now, his chest pressing against my shoulder, his fingers stroking mine. His lips hover over the nape of my neck, trying to decide the exact spot on which to alight. I feel them skim along the material of my blouse, making sorties across the edge of the cloth to play against bare skin. It is my throat now from which a sigh escapes, but Roopa is not there to hear it.