by Divya Sood
“Anjali?”
“Fuck, it’s close to one in the afternoon. What do you want me to say?”
“You could have called me too. But you were too fucking busy too, weren’t you?”
“What the hell, Jess. I went out with Ish. I told you that. I was home by eleven, waiting for you.”
“Whatever.”
“Where the fuck have you been?”
“Out.”
“Were you out with someone or at someone’s?”
“No,” I said.
“Then?”
“Just walking around. Just thinking. Starbucks by Union Square.”
“Really?”
“I just had a lot to think about. It was a rough night.”
“You could’ve told me. I would’ve been there.”
“I know but I needed the time. And I didn’t want to bother you.”
“Yeah…sounds like a lot of bullshit to me. I don’t know what happened last night but I feel that you were with someone. And you’re lying to me on top of that. Why don’t you just come out and say it?”
“Where’d you go with Ish? Did you go to The Pierre like we did on our anniversary?”
“What the fuck? I went with my best friend and her girlfriend to an Italian restaurant in the village. And then we shared a cab, I got out first since I was alone and they were together. Is that what you want to accuse me of? Really, Jess?”
It was my turn to be quiet. I couldn’t say anything. But could I tell her about Vanessa? Wouldn’t that be the worse choice? It would raise questions, questions to which I had no answers, nonetheless. I remembered I had vowed to try. Meant to be and all that. What was I doing?
“Anjali, let me just talk to you when I get home?”
“Bye.”
I hung up and tried to finish eating. But there was this guilt stuck in my throat and I couldn’t swallow. And I was no longer hungry. I threw out my food, kept the Diet Pepsi and hailed a cab. I was on my way home to Anjali.
When I got home, I didn’t need to take out my key. She was at the door, waiting for me to enter, kissing my face and pulling me into the apartment.
“You’re mine,” she said. “I kiss you, I touch you, no one else.”
What if she knew that Vanessa had kissed my face less than two hours ago, holding it in her rough brown hands, whispering my name before every kiss? I looked at Anjali without really seeing her and she mistook it for a look of desire.
She took me to her bed and undressed. She undressed me as well. I could have stopped her and wanted to because I hadn’t even showered after Vanessa’s caresses. I was uneasy. Anjali pulled me on the bed next to her. Then she just lay there and watched my confusion. Perhaps she understood more than I thought she did because she did not try to touch me. Instead, she kissed my forehead and held me to her.
“Tell me there’s no one else.”
“There’s no one else.”
“Promise me that.”
“Anjali, seriously. There isn’t anyone else.”
“Then promise.”
“I promise, okay?”
She was silent. She kissed my forehead softly and let me lay next to her, my head on her shoulder. To this day I don’t know if Anjali knew that I had spent the night with Vanessa. What I do know is that that autumn afternoon, I realized that the only other person who could kiss my forehead and make the world right was my mother. Now Anjali. And maybe Vanessa. My own misshapen trinity of women.
“Jess, try to sleep, baby. And maybe not tomorrow nor the day after but someday soon everything will fall into place.”
I held Anjali as we lay there, the afternoon sun bright outside the window. She stroked away my confusion and allowed me to listen to the rhythms of her heart. I wondered, as I often had, why I didn’t love her the way she deserved to be loved. She was, and always had been, the decipherer of the mysteries that my heart presented. Mysteries about love and lust and how and why, questions I couldn’t allow myself to try to answer because I was scared. It was Anjali who took all these questions and offered simple answers to me.
“I have something for you,” she said.
She left the room. When she returned, she stood, naked, holding a toaster with four wide slots, the chrome shining in the light.
“So you can toast your bagels and not be angry,” she said.
I laughed. But inside me, I felt myself beginning to cry. I didn’t understand how someone could care so much about how I liked my bagels or what I wanted. If someone had complained about my toaster, I myself would have just said, “Fuck bagels.” If I had told Vanessa about a toaster, what would she have done? I guessed probably nothing. But with Anjali I had complained about a toaster and in a day, she had seen to it that I could toast perfect bagels.
“Anjali?” I said.
“Yeah?”
“How do you love me so much, jaan?”
“I don’t,” she said. “You just think I do.”
“Is that so?” I asked as I lifted my head to look at her.
“You know I love you. I always have. I always will.”
“Why?”
“There are no whys in love, Jess. No becauses either.”
I lay down again and closed my eyes. I thought of Vanessa and leaving her studio. I wondered if I would ever return to her. I knew that I would. I knew I had fallen in love with her in a glance. I had believed in nothing in my life but nothing was more certain for me than Vanessa. Vanessa was someone I would love, Anjali the woman I already loved. I didn’t realize then that at no point would I be able to merely fuse two women together, that loving both would lead to choices and heartache. But at that moment lying naked with Anjali, fumbling with a shiny toaster, my life seemed simple. It seemed that I could inhabit two worlds, one with Anjali at 55th Street and one with Vanessa somewhere near the East Village or Central Park. I didn’t realize then that worlds collide, that they were one-dimensional and exist on the same plane as one another. All of that, I realize now. And know forever.
“Thanks for the toaster,” I said.
She laughed.
I started drifting to a place of sleep when I heard Anjali’s voice, soft and full of tenderness.
“Jess, if you could only see how I love you. There is nothing I want more than you. No one but you. And I want to give you everything. For you, baby, the world. But then you hurt me and sometimes I just can’t anymore. What is it you taught me in Bangla to say? “Aar paari na?” I can endure no more, right? That’s how I feel and I don’t know what to do anymore. What do I do? Do I keep loving you? Four years. Can you imagine loving someone for four years, watching her with other women as if she could devour them and you’re left on the side, waiting? Fucking waiting. I’m such a success, Jess. I’m a great doctor. I live in a great apartment. I have everything. Everything. Except you. And inside it kills me.”
As she cried, I did not stir. I did not let her know that I had heard. I did not let her know that, somewhere, within me, I loved her too. I couldn’t even let myself know the secret of how I loved Anjali. I didn’t love her the way she loved me and I wasn’t fascinated with her as I was with Vanessa. But I couldn’t help but love Anjali most of all because she loved me. She saved me from having to answer to myself. She saved me from trying to understand the randomness of my thoughts and the restlessness of my own heart. And yes, “Aar paari na” was a line I had randomly taught her. But to hear her say it and mean it and cry over it made me have tears of my own. How had I hurt her so much so often? I could say I wouldn’t hurt her again but I could not say that I would not see Vanessa again. So…where did that leave me?
I shifted slightly on Anjali’s shoulder. I remembered a sleep I had in her lap once as one of the most peaceful slumbers I have ever known. She was for me, and always would remain, the only person who loved me wholly and completely, for everything I was and, more importantly, for all that I wasn’t. So why couldn’t I be that for her? All my questions kept tumbling inside me until I fell asleep and even
then, dreams of Vanessa taunted me as dreams of Anjali elicited unease. But somehow, I stayed asleep.
When I awoke, the afternoon was long gone. Anjali was still in bed with me, wide-awake.
“What are you thinking?” I asked her.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Let’s watch a movie and get some Chinese,” I offered.
“Sure.”
I started to wonder if she somehow knew about my stay at Vanessa’s. But she couldn’t know. It was probably my guilt speaking. I looked at Anjali and her eyes were so far away, I couldn’t read what was on her mind.
“Jess,” she said.
“What is it?”
“You asked me why I loved you, right?”
“I did.”
I sat up and faced her. I held her hands, soft and delicate just like her life.
“So can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“What keeps you from loving me?”
“Why do you think I don’t love you?”
She laughed. I began to think perhaps there was more to Anjali than I thought.
“I can smell her perfume on your skin, Jess.”
“But she didn’t wear perfume today.”
Of all the stupid ways to get caught in a lie, I had discovered the stupidest making Anjali the cleverest woman I ever knew.
“Anjali …”
She laughed.
“Relax I’m just playing with you.”
“Listen…”
She turned away from me and I couldn’t see her eyes. I wondered if she was just playing with me or if she somehow knew.
“That wasn’t really funny,” I said.
“A movie and Chinese, Jess?” she said.
“It’s not what you think,” I said
She sighed.
“What will you tell me next…you didn’t fuck so it doesn’t count as cheating? Can we just drop it, please?”
“But….”
“Please let it go?”
She got off the bed and started to put on her clothes.
“But I don’t understand you. One day we’re “open to suggestion” and another day “no one can love me but you. What do you want from us? From me?”
She stopped dressing.
“If I tell you what I want, could you give it to me anyway?”
“Try me.”
She finished dressing and sat on the bed. She met my eyes with her gaze.
“I want you, Jasbir Banerjee, to be my girl. I want you to be completely faithful and that includes no emotional cheating as in ‘I spent the night with her but we didn’t fuck but talked it away so I did nothing wrong.’ I’m the only person you should be talking the night away with. But when you’re here, you are always too tired or too cranky or too full to talk to me. But you can go out and fucking talk the night away with someone else? No, that’s wrong, Jess. I want us to belong to one another completely. Can you give me that?”
I wondered how she knew that Vanessa and I hadn’t slept together. Was she that intuitive or was it just a coincidence that she spoke the truth? And while I thought of Vanessa and me not sleeping together, I realized we had spent an entire night doing everything but that. It was a night that, as it passed like sand in an hourglass, endeared her to me one moment at a time. But was I also endeared to her? And if I was starting to feel these things for Vanessa, wasn’t Anjali right? Wasn’t I guilty?
“Kabhi Alvidaa Na Kehna, Jess?”
“Huh?”
“Stop thinking about her and focus.”
“You know what? You said you didn’t want to talk about it anymore but you keep talking about it. And I don’t know what you think I did last night but it wasn’t what you think. What do you want? Just tell me what you want.”
“Nothing. I told you what I wanted. Now I want to just to watch a movie and eat.”
“Then let’s do that.”
“Kabhi Alvidaa Na Kehna?”
“Sure.”
Of all the Bollywood movies ever made, Anjali loved this particular film. Cheating couples, love in the wrong places. It’s not that I didn’t like the film. It was just that there were so many other films. But it made her happy and so of the very few things I did for her, I allowed her to watch the film as many times as she liked. It wasn’t as if I had to pay attention anyway. I knew the whole fucking thing by heart, the number of times General Tso, Anjali and I had watched the movie together.
“General Tso’s, white rice?”
Again it wasn’t as if General Tso’s was the only Chinese food in Manhattan. But that is what we ate, with white rice. I began to see why I felt that there was no hope with Anjali. She would love me, Kabhi Alvidaa Na Kehna and General Tso without question or hesitation as long as she was alive.
Ironically, it was a pleasant evening at the end of it all. We watched the film, talked about songs and choreography and saris and dialogue and ate warm Chinese rice and chicken. I thought about Vanessa only once and that was when Rani Mukherjee was crying at the station, torn between her husband and the stranger who she thought was the love she had never found but always wanted. I wondered if I was in her shoes now.
Anjali put her head in my lap. I lay my hand in the warmth of her hair and moved my fingertips until she fell asleep. I fell asleep sitting up against the headboard, careful not to disturb her. I felt that for all that I could not give her, I owed her the comfort of just this one night.
That is how we slept through the night, Anjali lying in my lap, me sitting up and not moving. The DVD finished and went back to the main screen. The disc spun infinitely upon itself, just as we were all spinning in our lives, certain that by going in circles, we would somehow move forward.
Chapter Nine
Since the next day was a Monday, Anjali had left the apartment by the time I woke up. I awoke to stale sheets and silence. After I brushed my teeth and washed my face, I walked into the kitchen to find that she had left me a grilled cheese sandwich covered with a plate to keep it warm for as long as it would stay.
As I ate my sandwich and made imported Italian coffee, I thought about calling Vanessa. I remembered clearly that I had promised the world to Anjali the night before.
But I wasn’t going to sleep with Vanessa. Vanessa had said so herself. And I wouldn’t spend the night out with her again. But wasn’t I allowed to have friends? I mean isn’t that what Vanessa and I were starting to become anyway? After all, Anjali had friends. Anjali had Ish. I picked up my cell phone and dialed Vanessa’s number which I had spent time memorizing. It embarrassed me now to realize I had deliberately spent time getting to know the digits of her number, had closed my eyes and repeated sevens and zeros and then ended abruptly with “sixty-nine.” I could have just entered it in my phone but there was some novelty, something almost risqué about memorizing it, keeping it secret from the rest of the world. So after some practice, the end result was that I knew her phone number and as I dialed, I became increasingly nervous.
“Hey, baby,” I said as nonchalantly as possible when she answered.
“Hey?”
“You know who this is?”
She was silent. I felt my stomach twist into a knot. Had she dismissed me before or after I had left her life? Had she forgotten my voice in minutes or hours? Had our conversation meant nothing to her although she had said it meant something, that she was scared of loving me?
“It’s Jess,” I said almost apologetically.
“Oh, hey, what’s going on?”
At least she remembered. But had she really displaced me?
“Did you not know who I was?”
“Like you remember every woman the morning after when she calls?”
“No,” I said, “But this is hardly the morning after.”
In the silence that followed, I didn’t know what to say. I felt betrayed.
“Listen, I’ll give you a call later. I have some things to do right now.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Talk to you so
metime tonight,” she said, “Take care. Bye.”
After she hung up, I stared at the phone for a while. I wondered what Vanessa was doing today. I wondered whom she was going to see, whose voice would make her laugh. I wanted to be the one talking to her while walking beside a fountain. I wanted to notice her and touch her and contemplate her movements. She made it sound as if all we had shared was a bed but hadn’t we talked and laughed through the night? Hadn’t we had a connection that superseded just a lay? Hadn’t we spoken of love and belonging and the Universe? Had it all meant nothing?
But then I thought of my conversation with Anjali. What had she said? “I want you, Jasbir Banerjee, to be my girl. I want you to be completely faithful…”
I threw away the rest of my sandwich and coffee. I then showered and put on some jeans and a GAP tee shirt, went to my room and looked through my drawers. Under piles of meaningless papers both blank and filled with information about bills and exam dates and school, I found my leather journal. I opened it to the first page and it was blank. A slip of paper, smeared with vermillion, fell at my feet. I picked it up. If I rubbed hard enough, my thumb would still be stained red. I marked the powder upon my forehead gently so as to bless myself without leaving a mark. I unfolded the paper slowly. It was a letter from my parents written shortly after my father’s heart attack. I read it again looking for the place where my mother’s smooth cursive changed to my father’s shaky and almost illegible handwriting. It read:
Dear Jasbir,
How are you beta? Hope medical examinations are not keeping you up too late at night and that you will surpass the rest. Here, we are getting ready for terrible heat and a bad monsoon. I had gone to Kali Mandir to pray for you. I have placed some sindoor on this letter. Bless yourself and put some on your forehead. You will see…you will be a medical student soon. Your father is dying to write so I am giving him the pen.
Jasbir!
She will not let me have any sweets including the prasad offered in prayer at the temple. She makes me eat bland food and take many medicines. When will you come and rescue your Baba? Come soon, ok? And while you study, have some fun also. You are in New York City!