The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

  Henry had to coax Vega at first but she canceled their dinner plans in the city and they went to the dance.

  They went a little drunk from a bottle of wine they shared at home. They went with ironic smiles, determined to record absurdities. In their tipsy walk up the hill, they joked about a fiber cake, prune-flavored vodka martinis, door prizes including monogrammed heart monitors. They even dressed up a little. Vega wore a chiffon skirt and Henry found a bowtie.

  The room—the large atrium they’d only seen from across the lake—was dolled up with streamers and balloons in red, white, and blue. “Overstock,” Vega whispered. “From the Fourth of July.” And Henry squeezed her hand.

  They stood near the door for a few minutes, feeling shy, feeling like a new couple. Plastic platters of pigs in a blanket and chips and dip were arrayed along one wall, soda, beer, and wine along the opposite. In one corner, the Funky Monkey, four reedy men in rented tuxes, were already on their first break. Mrs. Height—a blue silk scarf tied snug around her head—was sashaying their way with a plate of Ritz crackers and cheese. Someone’s grandson was using the band intermission to play a CD on a laptop, and “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” strained the small speakers. In the open space between food and drink, half a dozen or so couples two-stepped hand in hand.

  Cynthia found Henry and pulled him into a ring of her friends near the alcohol. Vega followed. “Look who made it, look who made it,” she cooed. Gordon was sitting in a chair not far away, a beer in one hand and in the other, a carrot stick that he rolled between two fingers.

  One of the women took Vega’s hand and Henry’s and clasped the two together. “You kids have to dance at least two songs,” she said. “That’s the rule for us, and don’t think you’re getting out of it. No one does.” They waited for the Funky Monkey to start up again, and then they did join the swaying hips and shoulders. For Henry, there were winks and nudges from the ladies on the floor. The quartet included a flutist, and when he played a weeping solo at the end of a peppier number, everyone slow danced. Henry bent his knees so Vega could rest her chin on his shoulder. As they danced, their ears touched.

  When the time came, it was going to be different for each of them, they both knew that. Vega would become unreachable, impatient and sullen as a teenager. Henry would cry and, if his wife was still alive, he’d draw her into his weak arms.

  They stayed at the party maybe an hour, no more than two. They both felt something pulling them home. In the kitchen, they shed shoes and bowtie and chiffon skirt, and kissed each other deliberately, thoughtfully. Upstairs in their bed they took their time. They brought each other along. In the morning, Henry placed a hand on Vega’s stomach and looked at her hopefully. She nodded “yes,” although it was impossible to know yet for sure.

  Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  Aphrodisiac

  KISHEN’S UNIVERSITY FRIENDS AT Cambridge completely understood when he talked to them about the sort of novel that should be written about India—the sort of novel that he wanted to write. The thing was, he explained, to get the integers right, to be sure that these were sunk into the deepest layers of the Indian experience: caste-ridden villagers, urban slum dwellers, landless laborers, as well as the indecently rich of commerce and industry.

  His own integers were sunk in a prosperous gated colony in New Delhi. Here he returned from Cambridge to live with his mother and his elder brother, Shiv, in the villa that his late father had commissioned in the International Style, which was prevalent at the time. During Kishen’s absence, Shiv had got married—in a big, traditional wedding, which Kishen couldn’t attend because he was in the middle of his finals. So he didn’t meet his new sister-in-law until his return. He hadn’t meant to stay in India. He’d wanted to go back to Cambridge and maybe study for another degree until he felt himself ready to start on his life’s work. But then this happened, she happened: his sister-in-law, Naina.

  It hadn’t been an arranged marriage; Kishen’s mother was too modern to arrange marriages for her sons. A respected economist, she had always been at the forefront of educated Indian women. Sometimes she and her elder son even served on the same committees, for Shiv was a high-ranking bureaucrat. He had met his bride at a reception in honor of her uncle, a member of parliament, who had brought Naina from her father’s estate in their native province for her first visit to New Delhi. She was very young, shy, scarcely educated, though she had attended an élite girls’ boarding school in Jaipur. After her marriage, her mother-in-law tried to encourage her to study at some New Delhi college, but Naina claimed to be too stupid—yes, even for domestic science.

  Although Kishen couldn’t help agreeing that she was, to some extent, stupid, she was the only person in the house with whom he was eager to discuss his projected novel. She took no interest in it at all, yet somehow she casually disposed of one of his greatest problems: how to communicate the nuances of Indian life in English, which was the only language in which he could truly express himself. Naina simply jumbled up her languages, English and Hindi. When he tried to talk to her about his work (because he wanted to talk to her about everything), she didn’t even pretend to listen. Instead, she said, “I’m meeting the girls—coffee pina hai. Aoge? Chalo bhai we’ll have some fun—mazza ajaiga.”

  She had formed her own circle of girlfriends, and Kishen soon became a source of entertainment for them. Naina was proud of the way he amused them and humored all their concerns. They valued his opinion in matters of style, and also of culture, though he laughed at their taste, which hadn’t changed since they were schoolgirls. They held morning coffee parties in the smartest Connaught Place restaurants or watched pirated films together on the giant screens in their giant living rooms. When they cried at a heroine’s onscreen plight, Kishen would murmur some remark into Naina’s ear, converting her tears into giggles, which soon spread to all the weeping girls.

  They liked attending polo matches and pretending to be in love with the contestants, who were princelings from the President’s Bodyguard. These young women were all married, but mostly to rich, paunchy businessmen who in no way resembled the polo players. Only Shiv was tall and handsome (the opposite of Kishen), and Naina’s friends sincerely appreciated her good luck. So did she, though she was, or pretended to be, critical of Shiv: of his absorption in his work, which didn’t leave enough time for her; of his lack of interest in the romantic films and books she adored. She often laughed about him—she imitated his walk, the way his feet splayed outward, so busy, so important—and Kishen laughed with her. If his mother overheard them, she rebuked them but couldn’t help smiling with pride in her elder son, which she knew Naina, for all her mockery, shared. Only Kishen’s laughter was genuine.

  Mother and Shiv, both busy with their work, were glad that Kishen and Naina were such good company for each other. But sometimes Mother would ask, “And your work?” For she was waiting for Kishen to become as successful in his field as Shiv was in his. “Coming along,” Kishen answered, and he considered this to be true. He felt that, with Naina and her friends, he was immersing himself in his material. They were the integers with which he would build his world—the India that he knew, not what others thought he should know. The girls, too, were waiting for him to become published and famous. When they asked what he was writing about, he said, “You.” That made them laugh, and they clamored for a percentage of the fortune he was going to make with their lives.

  Meanwhile, he entertained them with stories, anecdotes from their New Delhi social world—hungry kites swooping over an open-air banquet, new, palatial apartment buildings without electricity or water, the Ayurvedic doctor poking his tented patients through their burkas, the dire results of a homeopath mixing up his aphrodisiacs with his laxatives. “You should write it down!” the girls exclaimed—and, at their urging, he began to do so. They snatched the pages from him and sent them to the editor of a leading English-language newspaper, who was a friend of all the girls and the lover of one. These writings—these tongue-in-ch
eek anecdotes—became the basis of his local fame. A magazine commissioned a weekly column; he was read everywhere. Mother returned from her meetings reporting the chuckles of her fellow committee members; Shiv quoted a cabinet minister who said that Kishen “had hit the nail right on the head.” Everyone was proud of him.

  That was during his first two years back in India. Then things began to change in the house. Actually, physically, they had begun to change soon after Naina’s arrival. Mother had originally furnished the house with the newfound enthusiasm of the intellectual classes for indigenous Indian handicrafts—vibrant textiles from Orissa, village women’s silver anklets turned into ashtrays. Now another layer was added, for whenever Naina went home to see her family—which she did often in those first years—she brought back precious objects of her own. These were not village handicrafts but something differently indigenous: the gaudy taste of the maharajas’ palaces, which had drifted down to her own family of feudal landowners. She installed multicolored chandeliers, oil paintings of hunting parties and court ceremonials. Mother’s bright hand-loomed rug was replaced by the pelt of a recently killed tiger. Naina was so proud of these acquisitions that Mother even allowed the head of a water buffalo to be nailed to the wall, though it had to be taken down when, having been improperly embalmed, it began to decay and disintegrate.

  Then came Naina’s first pregnancy, for which, in accordance with custom, she went home. When she reappeared, it was not only with a baby but with his nurse. This nurse, known as Bari-Mai, had been Naina’s mother’s and Naina’s and was now very old. She spoke in a dialect that only Naina could understand, and she made it clear that no one in the house was of any importance to her except Naina, whom she called Devi (goddess), and the baby, Munna. But with Kishen Bari-Mai did establish a peculiar relationship. From the first moment she saw him, she wheezed so much that she could only point at him in derision—but for what? Naina said, “It’s because she’s never seen anyone like you.”

  “You mean, anyone so ugly?”

  “Aré, gosh, darling, yeh kya baat hai? What are you saying?” She stroked his cheek, and, although he liked this affectionate gesture, it made him aware that he was short, squat, and balding: ugly, no doubt, to both her and Bari-Mai.

  “Dekho, Baba—Papa hai!” Naina called out when Shiv came home from the office, and she thrust the bundled baby into his arms. Shiv held him nervously. No one in the family felt comfortable holding the baby. There was something disconcerting to them in the many little amulets he wore around his neck and wrists, each guarding him against a disease or the Evil Eye. He was also greasy from the oil that Bari-Mai smeared on him for the health of his skin and hair. And he had a peculiar smell, which was not that of a baby but more—though no one said it—that of Bari-Mai. For not only did she clutch him all day but she slept with him at night, on the floor of the nursery that Mother had furnished for him with a new white cot, a playpen, and a mural of Mother Goose rhymes.

  After Munna’s birth, Naina abandoned the outings with her girlfriends, and Kishen stayed home with her. She was very free in his presence, suckling the baby at her great round brown nipples, while Kishen sat near her, scribbling a piece for his column. He was a chain-smoker, and sometimes she had enjoyed a cigarette with him. Now she returned to chewing betel, and one day she ordered Bari-Mai to prepare one for Kishen as well. “Open your mouth,” she told him, and he was about to obey her when he saw his mother’s cook making warning gestures at him from behind the door. “Aré—open—kholo, bhai,” Naina said impatiently. Ignoring the cook, Kishen allowed her to pop the leaf into his mouth. He disliked the taste and the feel of it. He asked, “What does she put in it?” Naina laughed. “Khas cheez hai—something very special to make you love Munna and me forever.”

  It was Kishen’s birthday, and Mother had a gift for him. She watched him unwrap it: a slim volume tastefully bound in hand-loomed cloth, containing reprints of his newspaper and magazine articles. Full of her own excitement and pleasure, she said, “It’s all there. All your beautiful work.” He thanked her, kissed her, but he thought, Is this all you expect from me?

  They were interrupted by the cook, who burst in on them, wailing, “With my own eyes!” He had seen with his own eyes how she—the witch, Bari-Mai—had stirred a powder, a poison, into Kishen’s birthday pilao. Naina came rushing in, shouting that Bari-Mai had wanted only to add her own touch with a pinch of saffron. “Zaffran,” the cook repeated angrily. “As if I don’t know zaffran.” Naina had already turned from him to Munna, riding on her hip. “Bolo—Happy birthday, Chacha-Uncle!” She thrust him forward to greet Kishen with sticky caresses.

  But later, when they were alone, she said, “It’s all lies. Don’t believe them.”

  “No,” Kishen said. “I don’t believe Bari-Mai is trying to poison us.”

  “They’re all crazy. Pagal hai sab. They think she’s a terrible witch.”

  “It’s you,” he said. “You’re the terrible witch.” Before she could say anything, he went on, helplessly waving his arms, “I’m twenty-seven years old today and I haven’t done a thing. No! No, I have not written a beautiful book. Only Mother thinks so.”

  “Munna thinks so,” Naina said, nibbling Munna’s ear.

  “When Munna grows older, he’ll laugh at me as I’d laugh at anyone who wrote this sort of rubbish. But what’s the use of talking to you? You don’t listen to anything I try to tell you.”

  “Oh, yes. I’m very stupid.”

  “You are—no ideas, no theories—thank God! If you had them, if you drove me crazy the way I drive myself crazy, thinking and theorizing and doing nothing all day but sitting here with you and all night thinking about you—it’s you, you who’s poisoning me. No, don’t go away!” To keep her from leaving, he put his arms around her waist. At first too surprised to resist him, she then did so with ease. Not only was he shorter than she; he was overweight and breathless with lack of exercise. She gave him a push that sent him staggering backward to the floor, then stared down at him with angry, kohl-rimmed eyes. He stared back, partly in fear of her, partly in fear of himself and the sensation that had filled him when he touched her hot, soft flesh. The next moment, she put out her hand to pull him up; she was laughing, and he tried to laugh, too. It was all just a game between them.

  When a second boy was born, Bari-Mai decided that only she could provide the nourishment her Devi needed to breast-feed two babies. She pushed aside the cook’s stainless-steel vessels for her own blackened cauldron, into which she stirred spices unwrapped from little twists of newspaper. Noxious cooking smells—asafetida, like a gas—pervaded the house. Naina moved around her urine-and-milk-soaked kingdom with one child on her hip and another sucking at her breast. Shiv’s study was moved out of earshot of the rest of the house, and as far as possible from what had been his marital bedroom and was now inhabited by both children and Bari-Mai, who stretched out on the floor, bundled in the single cloth she wore day and night.

  Shiv began to come home later every night; Naina was always waiting for him. They spoke in low voices, but not intimately. Naina’s initial passion for her husband had changed into some other kind of passion, charged with resentment. Kishen, in his bedroom, willed himself not to hear, and he guessed that his mother was doing the same. When he went into her room after a restless night, he found her sitting up very straight, with her hands folded in her lap. Mother said, “Of course he comes home late—he’s very busy with meetings and conferences with the cabinet, with the Prime Minister. He’s important to the whole country.” Her voice rose. “She should be proud!”

  “She is proud.”

  “She doesn’t understand. She understands nothing.”

  A modern woman, Mother had set herself against the stereotypical role of mother-in-law. She was determined not to complain about her daughter-in-law, or about the encroachments, the ruin of her ordered household. So she said nothing, not even to Kishen. Instead, she stayed out of the house at meetings of her own. Ki
shen suspected that she was no longer elected to the offices for which she had once been the unquestioned candidate. But still she forced herself to be present—trimly dressed, her short, stylishly cut gray hair brushed back, even a dab of lipstick and rouge applied to simulate an energy that was no longer required of her.

  Meanwhile, the boys were growing up. They were no longer attached like limpets to their mother’s body. And then they grew up more and were sent off to boarding school in the hills. Kishen had expected that Bari-Mai would be sent away, too, but that didn’t happen. She still spent her nights rolled up at the foot of Naina’s marital bed while Shiv slept on the couch in his study. He was at the height of his career now, and there were photographs of him in the newspapers, hovering beside the Prime Minister at the signing of an agreement that he had helped negotiate. However late he came home, Naina waited up for him. Her voice had become more strident and desperate; Kishen listened in spite of himself, and he knew that Mother, too, was awake and listening.

  During the day, he could no longer sit quietly writing his column by Naina’s side. She kept interrupting him with complaints about Shiv; and when Kishen tried to defend his brother by saying that he was working late, she brought out the newspapers with photographs of Shiv and the Prime Minister and pointed to some female under-secretary in the background. It might have been a different woman in each picture, but Naina sneered in outrage—“Is this his work? Fine work!” Once, she dragged Kishen to the room where Shiv now spent his nights; she picked up his pillow and thrust it into Kishen’s face. “It’s her smell. Her dirty smell he brings home with him after he does what he does with her.” She made a sound of disgust and Bari-Mai echoed it with a splutter of saliva. More and more it seemed to Kishen that Bari-Mai was not a person at all but an emanation of something in Naina herself: something that had been bred for generations in the stifling women’s quarters of their desert home.