Marriage of a Thousand Lies

by SJ Sindu

  In college my sister Shyama dated a man named Dave—a reserve Air Force staff sergeant who took night classes with her at Columbia—the type of man, she told me, who didn’t believe in god or extraneous appliances. His Bronx apartment was sparse and clean. She liked it for its blankness. The walls were beige, the carpet was tan, and even with the paintings from the farmer’s market that she eventually hung up, the place still looked bare with a minimum of furniture. A couch, a glass coffee table, and a bookcase that held a single row of mystery novels. Dave didn’t have plants or animals, not even photos in frames. But he had a guitar that he practiced every night from six thirty to seven, and from nine to nine thirty. He ate dinner at seven fifteen, and went to bed at ten forty-five.

  Shyama told me she didn’t know if she loved him, only that he made her feel like she was doing something wrong. When in public, she wouldn’t hold his hand. Amma, Appa and I lived only five hours away, and she had this fear that we would come to surprise her one day. So they stayed in Dave’s apartment.

  She knew it was coming. At every holiday when she visited home, she asked me if I’d heard Amma and Appa talking about her marriage. I always said no, but I never listened at their closed door. They sprung it on her when she came home for the summer after her junior year. I had no warning.

  “Your uncle’s wife,” Amma said. “Her parents’ neighbors have a nephew in Canada. He’s thirty-two, an engineer.”

  Shyama’s face went still. She looked at me. I stared at the dining table and tried to shrink into my seat.

  “An engineer. He owns a house and everything.”

  Shyama picked up her suitcase and tried to walk up the stairs.

  “A house, Shyama. That means he’s responsible. A very good boy.”

  Shyama paused on the steps and turned around, still holding her suitcase. “You’re serious?”

  Amma’s smile quivered. “You’re getting old. You need a husband.”

  A year after Shyama got married, Amma and Appa split up, and Appa married Laila Aunty before the ink on the divorce papers dried. Maybe they knew it was coming. Maybe they hurried Shyama’s arrangement so that her marriage could happen before theirs broke. No parents would send a son-in-law to a broken home.

  “You can’t walk through life alone,” Appa said.

  Shyama bit her lip. Was she thinking of Dave in his uniform? The summer would be too warm for all that heavy camouflage but that’s how I always pictured him.

  “You need someone to come home to,” Amma said.

  Appa coughed and put his hands in his pockets. “It’s a good feeling. To know you have someone waiting for you at home.”

  Shyama had told me that girls in Dave’s unit flirted with him all the time. She sometimes found their texts on his phone. He was too polite to say no. Amma and Appa would say that he wasn’t a stable investment.

  “He’s in Toronto,” Appa said. “His parents asked us to come see them.”

  Amma smiled large against Shyama’s vacant look. “We’re leaving this Friday.”

  Shyama couldn’t sleep that night, just tossed and turned in the bed we shared as I hovered on the edge of sleep. Her phone conversations with Dave were short and clipped. She lay in bed with the blanket over her head and whispered into her phone. She didn’t tell him about Canada. No mention of the arrangement. He was getting ready to ship out for annual training.

  “You can do whatever you need to do,” she told him.

  “I miss you.” His voice was muffled by the phone and blankets.

  “You’ll get over that.”

  “I love you.”

  “You may get over that, too.”

  When she wasn’t talking to Dave, I tried to console her. “Maybe you can tell Amma and Appa about Dave,” I said.

  Shyama looked at me like I was crazy.

  “It would stop them arranging things.”

  She frowned and looked away. “They’d kill me. This thing with Dave won’t last forever.”

  “So you’re just going to get married to someone else?”

  “I can always say no to this guy.”

  “You have to fight for your relationship.”

  “You don’t get it. There’s no saying no. I say no to this one, it’ll be another one, and then another, and then another.”

  “So you’re going through with the arrangement.”

  Shyama’s face still had that blank, unfocused look. “I’m not done fighting just yet.”

  Back then I believed in love, in forever. I would’ve done anything to fight for Nisha. But back then, Nisha didn’t want to be fought for.

  Appa emailed pictures of the engineer to Shyama. I watched over her shoulder. His name was Rajesh, and he posed in his house against stark white walls and landscape paintings in wooden frames. There he was standing next to his enormous oak dining table, his fifty-inch TV, his sports Audi. He wore suits and tight smiles in every picture. He had nervous eyes.

  Appa insisted on driving the entire nine hours to Canada by himself because he didn’t trust the women to drive well and no one insisted. Amma sat in the front seat and looked out the window while I sat squished between Shyama and Laila Aunty in the back. As Amma’s widowed best friend, Laila Aunty was automatically invited to join us. In retrospect, it’s hard to believe no one predicted Laila Aunty and Appa.

  Except for the old Tamil songs that Appa played on repeat, the car stayed silent. When we stopped at rest areas, Amma pinched Shyama’s cheeks and said, “Don’t worry so much. He’s a good boy.”

  Dave sent Shyama texts while he was on break from his training sessions in Nebraska. She tilted her phone away from Laila Aunty, but I could still read most of them. He told her she was beautiful, that he missed her and that he loved her. He didn’t seem like the kind of man to get over loving her.

  We checked into our hotel rooms late that night. I shared a room with Shyama, so we opened the doors to the balcony and let the city in. A breeze wove through the metal bars of the railing. The balconies on the apartment building across the street burst with kids’ bicycles and drying laundry, potted plants and worn wicker deck chairs, signs of immigrant families making a life. Toronto had comfort to it, like I could sink my toes in, with its strip malls of Tamil stores and ethnic fusion cuisine. I didn’t know of any other place in the world where you could get Irish-Caribbean sushi with a side of refried beans and mango chutney.

  “I wish you could come here,” Shyama told Dave over the phone. She stood on the balcony with her back to me, scratching her calf with her big toe.

  I tried to imagine Dave walking around the streets below, with his pasty skin and blonde hair, his Skechers shoes and tan cargo shorts like in the picture Shyama once showed me. White Canadians rarely ventured into immigrant areas. When we were younger, we played Spot the White People, and the one who saw the most won. Dave didn’t belong here. Of that Shyama was right.

  •••

  In Hinduism, the concept of dharma outlines the way you behave—the law of the universe, the amalgam of duties you hold as a sentient being made of stardust and god. The straight and narrow path. The right path. Dharma is the reason that people like Kris get married to people like me, the reason that Shyama gave up writing for graduate school, the reason that after the divorce, Amma is shunned at Sri Lankan gatherings while Appa is received with open arms.

  The next morning Amma knocked on our door before we woke up, already fully dressed.

  “Hurry up,” she said, clucking her tongue. “We need to go shopping.”

  “For what?”

  “Sarees.”

  Shyama pulled her blanket over her head.

  “For you,” Amma said, looking at her.

  “I don’t need sarees.”

  “Rajesh’s parents are not going to meet you in those homeless-person jeans you wear. Don’t be so lazy.”
r />   Before the store we stopped for breakfast at a Tamil shop. Shyama refused her dosai and sambar, even refused her coffee. Later, she wobbled in place and rubbed her eyes in the textile store entrance. The saree shop smelled like the back of Amma’s armoire where she kept all her Indian clothing, a sweet musty smell that tickled the space between my ears. Glass shelves covered the walls of the store, holding what looked like thousands of sarees. Here and there stood jewelry holders with heavy necklaces and earrings.

  Amma and Laila Aunty apparently knew the woman behind the counter. They talked pharmacy schools and husbands. Appa wandered off to look into the glass counters. I followed him and tried to be invisible. Shyama wasn’t so lucky.

  The woman slid behind the counter and pulled out sarees that she draped on Shyama’s chest. The three women scrutinized each one.

  “Too long. Makes her skin look dark.”

  “Blue is unlucky for a marriage.”

  “Too many sequins.”

  “Too plain.”

  “Which one do you like, Shyama?”

  Shyama pointed to a green saree with brushstroke designs.

  “That is not for young girls.”

  “Let her wear what she wants,” Laila Aunty said.

  “She will look old.”

  Did Laila Aunty know then that she was going to break our family apart? I wish I could remember if her gaze lingered too long on Appa, or if they shared secret smiles but I didn’t know to look for it then.

  Amma and Laila Aunty picked three sarees and two churidars. The sales woman cut out the blouse material from each one and took Shyama’s measurements.

  Next we headed to a jewelry shop that had floor-to-ceiling white bars under the glass, where we had to be buzzed inside. I looked at their display of nose rings while Amma and Laila Aunty weighed necklaces and earrings in their hands. Shyama checked her phone often.

  “Do they always buy you so many things?” Dave asked that night when she told him about the sarees and jewelry. I pretended to be asleep while she talked to him. She was careful not to mention why we had come to Toronto.

  “Daughters are supposed to have jewelry,” she said. “It shows the family’s wealth.”

  If it were me, I would’ve told him, if only to see if he stepped up to the challenge.

  •••

  At night we ate takeout from the Sri Lankan store just blocks away from the hotel. String hoppers, sambol, mutton rolls, every kind of food we could hope for, wrapped in newspaper and offered for a couple dollars. Amma and Appa took Shyama so that she could practice her Tamil by ordering, even though she would barely touch the food—too much oil, too much coconut milk. She wanted to shrink down to fit her clothes from high school.

  I stayed behind and drew on the balcony. The neighborhood of Scarborough sprawled out under me, its wide gridded roads, neon storefronts in Tamil and Mandarin, well-lit buses crawling along like glass beetles. I sketched loose and quick without thinking about composition or accuracy.

  Laila Aunty found me, her hair still dripping from her shower. She stepped onto the balcony in her flip-flops.

  “Why didn’t you go with them, dear?” She peered over my shoulder at my drawing. “You’ve drawn the sky too cloudy, no?”

  I looked up. The Toronto sky was clear except for a starved moon and pinprick stars. The sky I drew—clouds streaked across the graphite in a hurry to be elsewhere.

  Laila Aunty leaned her elbows on the balcony railing. “What are you going to wear to their house tomorrow?”

  “I’m sure Amma has something picked out.” I shaded in the underside of the clouds.

  “It’s not so bad, you know.” She watched the people on the sidewalk—Sri Lankans with skin indistinguishable from ours.

  “I know.”

  “Your sister will be happy. She’s a good girl. She’ll adjust.”

  Laila Aunty had been widowed for as long as I’d known her, but sometimes she spoke about her late husband and son—both lost to a bus bombing in Sri Lanka. Was hers an arranged marriage? Had she met her husband on a sticky summer night like this one?

  “Soon it’ll be your turn,” she said.

  “I won’t get married.” I spoke to my sketchbook. I’d never said it out loud, but the words had been forming in my head for years.

  “Of course you will, dear.”

  My hand shook where I gripped the pencil. “I won’t.” Itching crept in from the corners of my eyes. “I’m not like Shyama. I can’t.”

  Laila Aunty turned and looked at me, her eyes poring over my messy hair, my legs spread open on the wire hotel chair, the thin rainbow bracelet I’d taken to wearing.

  “You’ll grow out of it,” she said.

  “What if I don’t?”

  She looked back down at the people sliding through each other on the sidewalk. “You will.”

  •••

  It took Amma and Laila Aunty over an hour to dress Shyama for the big night. They matched jewelry from old English biscuit tins stuffed into the bottoms of their purses. They fought over whether she should wear a saree or a churidar.

  “A saree is just too old fashioned,” Laila Aunty said. She wouldn’t budge, so Shyama wore a churidar.

  Amma draped a necklace on Shyama’s neck, placed gold bangles and earrings on the counter. No way those earrings were going to fit. Shyama’s ear holes were punched at a mall kiosk with a piercing gun—no thicker than a sewing needle. Indian earrings had heavy stems that gradually weighed down women’s earlobes.

  Amma held out a tube of moisturizer. “Try some cream.”

  She slathered lotion on Shyama’s lobes and hands. While Shyama squeezed the bangles over her knuckles and onto her wrists, Amma pushed a too-thick stem against Shyama’s piercing, which stretched against the pressure. Her ears flushed purple. With a pop, the stem slid in. Amma did the same to the other ear, while Laila Aunty wiped up bits of blood off Shyama’s lobes and neck.

  I dressed quietly in the churidar they gave me. Thankfully no one noticed me or fussed.

  •••

  As we drove toward Rajesh’s parents’ house, Shyama clicked more and more manically at her phone.

  Amma turned around in her seat. “Put that away. Don’t bring it into the house.”

  Shyama deleted Dave’s texts before turning off her phone and stowing it in the back of the driver’s seat.

  We neared the outskirts of Toronto and high rises gave way to row houses and then to new development neighborhoods with large homes on small plots. Lawns manicured green, flower boxes trimmed, decks tidy. And plenty of white people everywhere on the sidewalks, walking their dogs, jogging. After a few days of only seeing brown skin, I noticed them more than usual. I wondered if they had any idea that arranged marriages were taking place under their noses, that young men and women were marrying people they didn’t know.

  Appa pulled into a driveway at the end of a cul-de-sac and turned off the car. For a moment no one moved, and then with a “Here we go,” Amma opened her door and stepped out. Shyama shivered in her sleeveless churidar. I was glad to have worn long sleeves. Steep steps led to the door, squeezed in between two houses on either side as if the front of the house was just too large for the space.

  “Stand up straight,” Amma said. She rang the doorbell.

  Shyama pulled her shoulders back. Laila Aunty adjusted her clothes. The door opened and a high-school-aged girl grinned at us with braces.

  “Please come in,” she said so quietly that even Amma leaned forward to hear. She led us to the living room from the foyer. Rajesh’s father shook hands with Appa. Amma and Laila Aunty smiled and nodded at Rajesh’s mother. There was a lot of nodding all around. Rajesh avoided Shyama’s eyes but greeted everyone else.

  We took our seats. The plastic covering on the sofa crinkled as we sat down. Shyama twirled a piece of her
hair around and around her finger.

  “Your parents said you’re doing your degree in biochemistry,” Rajesh’s father said to Shyama. He was a short, stout man with watery eyes and a bald head.

  His wife looked shrunken in on herself, her skin saggy like Grandmother’s. Rajesh’s sister sat with her eyes on the floor. Through her tissue-thin shirt, I could see the faint outline of her shoulders.

  “What are you going to do after graduation?”

  Everyone looked at Shyama but she didn’t answer.

  “She is concentrating on school right now,” Amma said. “Shyama wants to take some time after college to do her writing and things.”

  “She’s a good writer,” Appa said. “She’s always writing these stories about our culture.”

  “Lucky for you then. My son doesn’t need his wife to work, so you can do your writing.”

  “She can teach classes,” Amma said.

  Shyama stared at the carpet. I held a cushion against my stomach and did the same. I was good at being quiet, but Shyama never was. Until now. In between the beige carpet strands, dark ones grew like weeds. Thick navy curtains hung over the windows. Potted plants hung in seashell planters. Each wall held pictures of Rajesh and his sister at various ages.

  “Don’t worry, Shyama. My son doesn’t know yet how to cook but he’s a good learner.”

  The parents laughed. Rajesh looked at Shyama but when she looked back, he turned away.

  “Why don’t we let the two of them go and talk?”

  “I want to take a drive,” Rajesh said.

  He led Shyama out to the car while the parents continued to talk in the living room. Rajesh’s mother got up to make tea.

  Amma pushed me by the shoulders toward Rajesh’s sister. “Why don’t you go talk with her? She’s your age.”

  I got up and sat on a hard dining chair next to Rajesh’s sister. She smiled shyly and looked at the floor again. She had a dark spot on her cheek that moved when she smiled.