In London, though, desire blossomed in Meterling, quickening desire. In amazement, she found herself in a state between sleep-deprived torpor and acute sensitivity. Mostly, they lay together skin-to-skin, hardly moving, happy in the weight of one another. But other times, she hungrily sought Simon’s kisses, twining her arms around him, pulling him toward her. Weren’t new mothers supposed to transfer their desire to their infants? But Simon wasn’t the father, so maybe that need to repulse the father came from the subconscious knowledge that he was responsible for childbirth pain. There—a new psychological insight. But whom could she ask? Dr. Morgan? Pa would know, and Pa might even tell, but Pa wasn’t here.
One day, she was late returning to the flat. The sun was coming down as she strolled Oscar back home. It had been raining earlier, and the wet made the asphalt shiny. She breathed in the air, but caught nothing, no surge of freshness, no increased negative-ion activity. The store lights weren’t yet on, but in an hour, as teatime neared, they would be. She stopped in front of a store that sold beautiful cashmere sweaters, hung on steel hangers like artworks, in pale pastels and varying shades of gray. Looking up, she had seen for a moment her own face superimposed by the window’s reflection onto one of the headless mannequins wearing a wool lace miniskirt and boots that stretched over its thighs (did mannequins have thighs, or merely legs?). The breasts were bare and pointy, because either that was the fashion or the store clerk hadn’t finished dressing it and had popped out for a cigarette. The mannequin’s skin was stark white, and Meterling saw herself hovering over it like a ghost wearing its clothes. She pulled her raincoat closer to her body, wishing she’d mended the torn pocket, sewed the button. It belonged to Simon, and the lining smelled like him, which comforted her a bit.
They were in Kensington, and Pimlico wasn’t that far. Looking up, she noticed a black Mercedes pull up to the curb in front of the familiar green awnings of Harrods. The driver got out, and a woman in a burka emerged, wearing sunglasses. Why would she need sunglasses at dusk? She strode swiftly past Meterling and entered the store. On a whim, Meterling followed. She and Oscar could always take a cab home.
The woman headed for a set of elevators, quickly navigating among the crowd of people buying food for dinner. Smiling, she entered the elevator with the woman, joining a few other women. No one said a word as the lift ascended and the woman got out at the third floor: gift wares and bedding. She followed the woman, curious to see what the woman would buy. Sheets upon sheets of linen, it turned out, prettily packaged, deeply expensive, and forming thin, flat packages. Was she buying for a hotel? That would be a job done on the phone. No, it must be for her own boudoir. She must be the wife of a Saudi prince, or maybe she was an executive, a president of a company that didn’t mind women presidents. There were so many sheets. “Thank you, Ms. Mirazi,” said the clerk, handing her two dark-green bags. If she was someone so wealthy, wouldn’t she have a servant to carry her bags? And at the same moment Meterling thought this, a man stepped quietly from behind—where had he come from?—and took the bags. Her servant, or her guard, had been watching Meterling watching the mysterious woman. The pair headed back to the elevator.
Checking on Oscar, Meterling wandered a bit on this floor, until she came across tiny pottery figures of English houses. This was more like the house she had imagined, with a thatched roof. Oscar stirred.
“Do you think you’d like to live here?”
Oscar blinked at her.
“In a thatched cottage somewhere in the country, so when you grow, you can run around?”
Oscar made a spitball and drooled on his chin.
“Well, I guess you are a city boy, then,” she said.
“He should be eating sugarcane and running around barefoot,” said a voice near her ear. She flinched, but did not speak to Archer.
33
The sky was moody, a palette of grays and blues, darkening quickly. Without the lush green color of the tropical island greenery, rain in London fell miserably, creating damp, depression, chills. No wonder the English loved their English teas, their English scones with double cream, which they called English even though in reality the latter had been used in Indian cuisine for thousands of years while the British tore at roast beef and hunted deer, drowning all with ale. My aunt wrinkled her nose; she would not fault the English for their ignorance, she resolved. Still, what did the women drink before the East India Tea Company? Cider from North America? Punch? She knew that when English women first tried to serve tea, they had no idea what they were doing. They served the leaves, boiled like potatoes, in tiny plates, tried to eat it, and wondered what the fuss was about. Yet these same English learned to make tea, and serve sweets to go with tea, little cakes with lemon glaze, and buttery biscuits. On Pi, she had devoured Jane Austen’s books like chocolate, imagining the sprigged muslin dresses, the crowds at Bath. She didn’t recall teas in the books, but she remembered the dinners. Persuasion was her favorite—and it was at the table Austen brought together the surprises and catalysts for plot, she remembered Miss Shanta impressing on the tenth standard. Real dinners were not like that; if violent emotions were felt and hidden, it was because a train was late, or there was less pocket money for the monthly budget. Conversations were unremarkable in her life, unless good spirits and humor were cause for notice. What had George Eliot said—that it was the unremarkable people who made for the equanimity of life in peacetime? Something like that.
Simon had bought her a cookbook that was full of vegetarian British food. It had beautifully photographed terrines and timbales, cassoulets and soups. She leafed through it, and tried to make a tart with leeks. The vegetables were hard to clean; she forgot to blind-bake the pastry and reduce the temperature of the oven. A burnt pie resulted, the smell lingering in the air for days. She cried as Simon laughed.
When she first tried to eat pizza, (“pete-za,” she reminded herself, not “pisa”) slicing across the cheesy top with a knife, Simon had had to convince her the tomato sauce was really vegetarian. Didn’t Americans eat pizza with their hands? The British used fork and knife. It was tasty, if chewy, but the red sauce was disquieting. What would Darshan joke? They put meat in their pies, plugged in their water to boil, and made coffee from a jar. They traveled in tubes. English people, she discovered, spoke very fast, even on that television show with the Indians. They had a secret vocabulary, it seemed, and she wanted subtitles to follow. She resolved not to call the British “they.” She drew her shawl closer to her body over her sweater, because she was home now, having gone out to purchase milk, raincoat dripping by the door, rubber boots off, groceries inside, and having made herself a cup of tea.
She wondered if Susan would share a cup of tea with her if she telephoned. But Susan was so distrustful, so wary, as if always working to bite back her resentment but not always succeeding. I am the woman who killed Archer, thought Meterling, the woman who made him dance. It was Archer who insisted on the dance lessons. Couldn’t she tell Susan, “Look, could we just start over?” But then, why should she be so conciliatory toward Susan? So her brother married me; so her cousin married me, too. What did it matter? Susan was Oscar’s aunt—wasn’t that enough?
Simon appeared, interrupting her thoughts, tousle-haired, as if he had awakened from a nap. He needed a shave. He treasured his Sundays, and would wear his pajamas all day. Buried under the newspaper or under the covers, he emerged to coo to the baby, eat, and make love to his wife. This is what they meant when they, whoever the wordsmiths were, coined “a month of Sundays.” Absentmindedly giving her a kiss, he walked to the window and rested his head on his arm against the pane.
“Damn. Does the English sun ever appear except in its former colonies?”
“Imagine contented Englishmen at home in sunny gardens, with no need to plunder and pillage.”
“Ah, plunder and pillage,” said Simon speculatively, but Meterling waved him off and went to make him a cup of tea. She liked Yorkshire tea best, strong and good, ab
le to stand hot milk and sugar. She discovered that tea could be satisfying to the end, and wondered if it had to do with the weather. Just as she was to take Simon’s cup in, she heard a plaintive cry. Oscar? But this sounded more like a cat, a meow that sounded distressed. Opening the back door, she found a small black kitty, now mouthing its mews silently. She stared in amazement, not having witnessed such a silent appeal since seeing the street widows on Pi with their begging bowls, who were so exhausted, so tired, they could only mutely ask for alms. Hurriedly, she opened the screen and scooped the cat in.
“Simon, we’ve got a visitor.”
“Oh, dear God,” he said when he saw the cat.
“We have to take care of it. Go get me a towel.”
“What about my tea?”
“Don’t be an idiot.”
Soon, wrapped in a once-white towel after being gently but thoroughly rubbed down, the grateful cat softly purred.
“And it might belong to someone else. The landlord won’t let us keep a cat, darling.”
“Well, we’ll have to move.”
She was kidding, of course, but Meterling’s insistence on keeping the cat caught Simon by surprise. He hadn’t witnessed her stubbornness so completely before. Maybe in this strange new world, she needed an ally. They put out flyers and an ad in the paper, but no one claimed the cat. He found himself liking the creature that came running to him after work as he removed his coat. It stood on its hind legs, trying to greet him as people do, and flopped over onto its back, waiting for its belly to be rubbed.
“A thoroughly domesticated kitty,” he said, “aren’t you, Pibs?”
“Pibs?”
“Puss-in-Boots.”
Pibs took to guarding Oscar, who liked grunting into his face. At first, they worried that Pibs would bite suddenly, but Pibs and Oscar seemed companionable. Evenings, Pibs lay contentedly on a pillow by Oscar’s bouncy seat, while Meterling and Simon read by lamplight beside the fire. Simon taught her to twist newspaper, layer kindling and finally a log; and on drafty days, she liked nothing better than the fire. They had found an old hearth toaster in an odds-and-ends market, and she sometimes heated chocolate between slices of bread.
But despite this warmth and affection and food and lovemaking, there were still long stretches of day which found her doing nothing at all, long stretches when Simon was away and cat and child asleep, days where she often just stared out the window. This was when the blue slipped in, even as her thoughts became full of lush color and strong images, when she remembered sitting on the veranda with tea, the kids beside her, or Grandmother. She thought of Archer, his innate kindness, his joviality, how they began to trust one another. She stopped herself—what if his ghost were to appear? But her thoughts ran on. If only Archer had known Oscar—that was the thought that climbed its way to the top of her thoughts. If only, if only—that terrible trap of the mind. But wasn’t the darker thought that she felt grateful he’d died, if only to have Simon? That was why she disliked these large spaces of day: it made her examine what she didn’t want to examine. It left her ragged.
“But I feel it too, Meti. It’s horrible. It’s almost as if I killed Archer with my mind. When I first saw you at the wedding, I was lightning-struck. I couldn’t believe Archer’s luck, and I’m sure I instantly wished I were in his place,” said Simon when she approached the subject. He bit his lip. “My father said it’s things like this that you don’t question, you don’t torment yourself with, and I have to agree with him.”
Meterling had to agree as well. It was pointless to pick over the past; yet why did the past creep up on her when she found herself lonely? As if on cue, Oscar began to cry, and she went to feed him. Maybe she should be grateful for what she had; and really, this feeling, Oscar gently sucking, was so lovely, she didn’t, she must not, want more.
One Saturday, when Simon asked her where she wanted to go, she said she was exhausted and wanted to stay put.
“I feel like we’ve opened all the presents at once, Simon, and now there’s all this debris, the boxes and the strings and ribbons and wrapping paper that needs to be put away.”
“There are still some boxes left.”
“Can’t we just hang on to them a bit longer, wait to open them?”
“London isn’t finite. No city is.”
“Let’s just stay in bed with the baby and eat toast.”
“Or let’s just let Oscar play a bit more in his bouncy seat.”
“Where did Asian women learn to lean their cheek on their hand? Is it inborn or learned?” asked Simon.
“Learned, obviously, but surely Western women do the same.”
“Not as often. They play with their hair.”
“Honestly, Simon, where do you get these stereotypes?”
“I think it must come from a natural and historical sense of contemplation.”
“Your prejudices?”
“Women and their cheeks and their hands.”
“There are all those paintings of women looking out of windows. The miniatures always show that. Queens or handmaidens, but sometimes I wonder if they aren’t just prostitutes displaying themselves?”
“Like in Amsterdam?”
“Simon, where are we going for the long weekend?”
“Amsterdam? To sample the wares?”
He played with her hair. “I was thinking of France.”
But the conversation was already being left behind, as they engaged themselves more seriously with hands and cheeks. Later, they lay next to one another, panting. It was usually at this point that Meterling went to sleep, even as Simon felt ready for another go. Now they held hands, idly stroking one another, waiting for Oscar to cry. Pibs did, but they ignored him, knowing there was food in the bowl, water in the dish.
“Do you think Pibs needs a companion cat?”
“Is that a way of asking if I want another baby?”
“No, I meant—that is, I really was thinking of Pibs. But do you want another baby?”
“Do you?”
“Well, yes. In a few years. Wait, you’re not pregnant, are you?”
Meterling laughed at his stricken face, and reassured him that she wasn’t. But she agreed that in a few years, they might think of another baby. They began to talk more seriously of where to go for the long weekend.
34
They went south, getting an early start to beat the traffic, or at the very least, avoid gridlock. They drove toward Craywick, while Oscar squealed every time they passed sheep. They stopped once for lunch, admiring the countryside, exploring two churches, and ate cheese-and-pickle sandwiches at a local pub. By the time they reached their hotel toward dusk, they turned in, skipping dinner. They woke to the sunlight drifting into the room through the lace-covered curtains and a racket of birdsong. It was chilly enough to light a fire, but instead, they wrapped themselves in quilts and ate breakfast on the terrace, slathering butter on hot toast, and drinking steaming cups of coffee.
“Let’s live here, Simon.”
“Okay,” he said, trying to feed Oscar mashed banana. He refused it. “Did you know birds macerate food for their young?”
“I mean it … one day. And yes, I thought everyone knew that.”
“Oh, really? Everyone?” he said, trying to feed her the banana and kiss her at the same time.
They explored the town on borrowed bicycles, visiting the pond that boasted enough ducks (that is, more than none) to cheer Oscar. Nearby, they stopped at a used-book store, which featured books cozily housed on wooden shelves, with the scent of lavender-honey tea permeating the air. Round tables held displays of local works and photographs from a time past. A vase of roses, anemones, and dahlias was next to the cash register, where a ginger cat was sleeping. The owner, Lucia, welcomed them, and offered them biscuits.
“I’m having my tea anyway.” She said this with a mysterious smile, murmuring something about Jaipur, about Udaipur. “And when I was a girl,” she continued, “I had a crush on Raj Kapoor. My na
me is Italian, but I grew up in France, and we watched all the Indian movies!”
So they had sat on faded upholstered chairs, drinking hot tea in big white cups, dunking biscuits like old friends. Lucia had owned the place for thirty years with her partner, she said, sounding almost surprised. Her smile was broad; this was what a successful woman looked like, thought Meterling, leaning back against the crochet headrest. Later, humming “Aawara,” Lucia wrapped their purchases up in paper, while Meterling took a last look to see if by some strange coincidence she would find Neela Chandrashekar’s work. There was a selection of works by Indian and British-Indian authors, but most were the household names. As they said goodbye to Lucia, she reminded them to get an early start the next day.
“Where are we now, Simon?”
They had followed a trail and now stood in a meadow, wild with weed and bramble. Trees edged it in the distance. Some sheep grazed in the distance, too.
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