Marriage of a Thousand Lies

by SJ Sindu

  “Do you like Tamil movies?” she asked.

  “Some.”

  “I like Rajnikanth movies.”

  She sounded like Nisha, though I could never tell if Nisha actually liked the movies or if she said it because it made her parents happy.

  Rajesh’s sister was called to help serve the tea. She bent down in front of me and held out a silver tray of teacups and suddenly I felt like the groom in a Tamil movie meeting the bride for the first time—this scene so iconic it’s in almost every Tamil film.

  The parents talked more and more nervously as time went on and Shyama hadn’t returned with Rajesh. By the time they came back, Amma and Appa had schooled their anxiety into fake smiles.

  Amma waited until we were back in the car and had pulled out of the driveway. She turned around from the front seat.

  “Well?”

  Shyama turned on her phone. Its screen lit her face in blue.

  “He seems like a nice boy, no?” Laila Aunty said.

  “Very good family.”

  There were five texts from Dave.

  “You like him, no?”

  “Not really,” Shyama said.

  “What is that,” Amma said, “not really?”

  “I mean, I don’t like him.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t.”

  “What do you not like? He’s a good boy.”

  “There just wasn’t any chemistry.”

  “Chemistry?” Amma’s voice rose in pitch and volume with each word. “Chemistry? What does that have to do with it?”

  “There just weren’t—you know—any sparks.”

  “Sparks. So now you want sparks. Sparks cause fires.”

  Shyama looked down at her phone and read the texts. I miss you. You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever met. We train 10 hours a day and every minute I think about you.

  “The chemistry will come with time,” Laila Aunty said.

  Amma turned to Appa, who was silent. Was he thinking about Laila Aunty, about the divorce papers he knew he was going to file?

  “Your daughter is a fool,” Amma said.

  Shyama flies into town with her husband Rajesh and their one-year-old son Varun for Nisha’s engagement ceremony. Appa and I pick them up from the airport. Shyama’s hair jumps around her plump face like electricity. She hasn’t started to show yet, but her cheeks are a little rounder than they’d been between pregnancies. Varun rides on her hip, his smooth face on her shoulder. Rajesh lags behind them as they walk out of the glass security doors, rolling a green flowered suitcase behind him.

  Shyama was never the pretty one. She was the nice one, the one who made our parents happy. She convinced a five-year-old me to take dance class, pushed me into practicing when my legs hurt, attended every single one of my performances up until she went to college.

  But now, the energy seems sucked out of her. She looks small in the open air beside the building’s steel columns. She smiles when she sees us, but even that seems strained. I can’t tell if Rajesh smiles or not—his skin is so dark that I can only tell from a distance when he shows his teeth. Varun turns and presses his face further into Shyama’s shoulder. I hold out my arms to him but he clings on tighter.

  “He’ll come around after he gets used to you again.”

  Appa leads us through the airport toward central parking, always at the helm. Of course, he drives home. Rajesh rides in the front seat because he’s a man.

  I entertain Varun while Shyama snores with her head on the window. Varun smells like baby powder when I kiss his temples. At least Grandmother will be happy now that there’s a baby in the house. Maybe she’ll stop sitting outside.

  “Are you sure you want to stay there?” Appa asks as he takes the exit to Winchester. His voice is hard around the edges. Appa offered to have them at his house but Shyama chose to stay with Amma.

  Rajesh turns around in his seat for help from Shyama, who’s sleeping. He turns back and makes a noncommittal grunt.

  At Amma’s house, Appa follows us inside and stands in the doorway, studiously brushing lint off the suitcases until Amma invites him inside for dinner.

  Amma carries Varun around, kissing his cheeks and laughing while Grandmother watches from her folding chair. Bright toys litter the meticulously-scrubbed floor. Appa sits at the kitchen table with Rajesh and watches, the two of them slowly sipping the whiskey that Rajesh bought at the dutyfree. Everyone smiles too big.

  I help Shyama unpack. I set up the air mattress pump and leave it to fill while Shyama puts clothes into neat piles in the dresser drawers that Amma has cleaned out. Sleep casts deep shadows on her eyes, the skin around them almost purple. I’m not used to seeing her face so bare and tired.

  “How long have you been here?” She carefully folds baby clothes in the topmost drawer.

  “A month or so.” Nisha’s visits, Grandmother’s slow mania, everything blurs together.

  She turns around and puts her fists on her hips, looking so much like Amma that a chuckle tries to bubble up in my throat.

  “You haven’t seen Kris in a month?”

  “He came for Nisha’s party.”

  She narrows her eyes at me and doesn’t move.

  “I miss him. It’s hard being away from him.”

  She stares at me for a few more seconds, then sighs heavily and picks up some of Rajesh’s underwear from her suitcase. “Sometimes I wonder about you two.”

  Shyama’s always been observant, and unlike Amma she doesn’t let facts like our marriage get in the way.

  “Why did you do it?” I ask. “Why did you marry Rajesh?”

  She stuffs a pile of underwear into the dresser. “I don’t regret it.” She sounds like she believes it. “Rajesh is everything I could’ve asked for in a husband.”

  “You didn’t like him when you met him. You liked Dave.”

  She turns around and hushes me. Her eyes linger on the doorway. She unzips another suitcase. “Dave was nice. But we always had problems. It wasn’t worth the fight. Once I gave Rajesh a chance, I was happy.” She shakes out some blouses and puts them on hangers. When she catches my eye in the mirror, she looks away and stacks diapers into another drawer. “Hard to believe that Nisha’s getting married. Then again, it’s hard to believe that you got married—how long ago was it?”

  “Four years.”

  “Four years. God, I feel old.”

  She looks old. Gray creeps into her hair, streaking the blackness like lightning. She is starting to take on the saggy thickness of Amma’s skin. I like the look on her, but she probably hates it.

  “How’s the groom?” she asks. “Have you met him?”

  “I saw a picture.”

  She empties the suitcase and turns it upside down over the trashcan. “And?” She bounces it up and down until a couple of crumbs fall out.

  “He’s no Kris.”

  She puts down the empty suitcase and heaves another one on top of the bed. “I thought Nisha would be able to do better than that, with her looks and all.”

  I pick at a loose thread on Amma’s comforter. Unbidden, Nisha in her red wedding saree fills my brain. Nisha with real jasmines in her hair. Nisha with a thali. Nisha on her wedding night.

  “What I wouldn’t give for that girl’s looks,” Shyama says.

  I snap the thread loose from the rest of the stitching and wind it around my finger until it bites into my skin. “She’s very pretty,” I say.

  •••

  After a hurried and hushed call to Laila Aunty, Appa informs us that he’s staying for dinner. He laughs through the food, loudly and more often than I’ve heard him laugh in months. He loves all of us, but Shyama has always been his favorite. When she left for college, he moped around the house and started working late and on the weekends. But during Shyama’s visits
home he would somehow find his weekends and nights free and would come home early with groceries to make her favorite foods. The divorce shattered their relationship. Shyama never forgave him, refusing to stay at his house, and taking Amma’s side in all arguments.

  Now Appa takes generous sips of his whiskey and smiles wide enough to show his teeth. He waxes political about the first debate of the election season. Obama’s chances are dwindling, but Appa remains hopeful.

  Rajesh nods mutely and stuffs his face with food. I wouldn’t brag about my ability to eat with my hands, but I feel like a saint next to Rajesh, whose plate is surrounded with spilled food. He’s one of those men who was hand-fed by his adoring grandmother well into adolescence. Will Nisha’s husband be like that? Will Nisha cook for him?

  “It’s about time for Nisha,” Amma says. “She was getting so old.”

  Appa and Rajesh talk about work. Rajesh is pissed about being passed up for a promotion. “You know,” he says, brandishing a drumstick at us, “I bet if I was white those sons of bitches would promote me.”

  He says shit like this all the time, especially when he’s been drinking. He’s embarrassed by his thick accent and Sri Lankan degree, angry at his coworkers for not inviting him out to bars. He thinks he doesn’t get promotions because his boss is racist. I think it’s because he’s shy around white people.

  “You’ll get a promotion,” Appa says.

  “I need it. We have to get that extra room done on the house. The city makes us take out so many permissions, you know. They hate to see us doing so well.”

  They don’t need an extra room. But they’re the kind of people who buy a Mercedes when the next-door neighbor buys a BMW.

  Appa makes little noises of confirmation and the rest of us stay quiet. Shyama’s lack of embarrassment makes me angry.

  “You need that room,” Appa says. He sucks down the rest of his drink and looks at Amma expectantly. When she doesn’t look up or refill his glass, he sets it aside and goes back to his food.

  •••

  Kris goes to a conference in Seattle and can’t make it for Nisha’s engagement. At least this time we won’t fight about how much he’s allowed to touch me. I won’t have to drag his drunk ass home.

  We go to the bank to get jewelry out of Amma’s safe-deposit box. Rajesh drives Amma’s Camry through the winding, narrow streets of Arlington. Inside the small room at the bank, with the long, cold metal safe-deposit box open on the counter, Amma, Shyama and I sort through the years of gold accumulation to find suitably modern enough pieces to wear to Nisha’s engagement. Rajesh entertains his son outside.

  Shyama chooses a small necklace with a grape-like cluster of black stones.

  “That’s much too small,” Amma says. She pulls out a plastic pencil box and unfolds the old baby washcloth inside—I wonder if it’s mine—faded from its pastel glory to a dingy white. Amma’s wedding necklace lies inside, wrapped and carefully held onto the fabric with safety pins. Twenty-two karat gold, with white stones that look like diamonds but aren’t. She unpins the necklace carefully and holds it up to my neck, draping it around my collar. Even though I got a similar, more expensive necklace from Appa, I still love Amma’s. The gold is blackened at the corners where the links of the floral chain connect to each other. This necklace feels like it has history, even though Amma told me that the black means the gold is impure.

  “Can I wear this one?” I ask. “You can wear mine.”

  Amma clucks her tongue. “This one is old-fashioned, for old ladies like me.”

  I take it off my neck and wrap it carefully back in the washcloth.

  “You have strange taste, Lucky. You can wear it if you want.”

  I put the washcloth back in the pencil case and snap it shut.

  “I just want to see a smile on your face.” Amma unzips another jewelry case and collects a set of gold bangles on her finger. Two of them are Shyama’s favorites, with little pearls embedded in the filigree.

  I try to pick out the smallest earrings and a necklace large enough that it will lay flat instead of twisting. I hate fussing with things I’m wearing. Plus I have to wear my thali, and that’s too thick to be comfortable. Amma’s insistent on not skipping that part—the mark of a married woman is important.

  Amma ordered sarees from India and Shyama got the blouses stitched in Toronto according to each of our measurements. I haven’t even seen the saree I’m supposed to wear.

  Shyama and Amma hold up various pieces of jewelry to themselves, trying to imagine the sarees and how they’ll look. They debate on this bangle or that, whether or not they should wear tikkas and what size their earrings should be. I try to busy myself with wrapping each necklace carefully back in its fabric scrap and sorting the ones we’re taking from the ones we’re leaving behind.

  Tasha invites Nisha and me to a rugby game she’s refereeing. Radcliffe vs. BU. At the game, Nisha spreads out a blanket on the wet stadium grass. She crawls onto it and pats the space next to her. Tasha waves at us from the field where the two teams are warming up. Nisha shivers in the cooling air, so I hold her around the waist. People mill around us, setting up lawn chairs and trying to keep track of toddlers who’ve just learned to run.

  “How do you know Tasha?” I ask. The rugby girls seem like such an odd group for Nisha, but maybe she was different in college. Maybe she was out. We didn’t talk much after high school, so maybe this was a part of Nisha’s past I didn’t know about.

  Nisha smiles and watches the Radcliffe team jog around the pitch. “My first semester at Wellesley, I went crazy and thought I should try sports.”

  “So you picked rugby?”

  “It wasn’t so bad.”

  “You played?”

  She raises an eyebrow. “Why? Am I too delicate in your eyes?”

  “No.” I say it too quickly.

  “I played a semester. But practice started cutting into study time. I couldn’t keep up.” She rests a hand on my knee. “Plus Amma and Appa started asking about the bruises.”

  “I want to see you play.” I wonder if her fiancé knows he’s marrying a rugby player. If he could see her now, kissing my neck, smearing her sticky gloss all over my skin.

  “I’ll play next time,” she says into my ear.

  She spends the first half of the game running her fingers up and down my thigh, explaining the rules I don’t understand.

  •••

  At halftime Tasha walks with us to her car. We sit inside. She offers us a bottle of Sprite. “It’s mostly vodka.”

  Nisha uncaps it. She takes a swig and grimaces. She passes it to me. For the first time in a long time I don’t feel like drinking. But she holds it out so I take it. The mixture bites into my tongue and leaves a bitter aftertaste that stays in my nose.

  Tasha refuses the bottle. “Later,” she says. She sits backward in the driver’s seat and watches the two of us. “Has Nisha told you she used to play?”

  “It’s not that big a deal,” Nisha says.

  “You were a solid player.”

  “I was an okay player.”

  “Remember the Brandeis game? When you tackled Lu and knocked her out?”

  “I bumped her head with my shoulder by accident when we fell down.”

  “It was fucking badass. I wish you’d play with us more.”

  Nisha drinks some more from the Sprite bottle. I feel like I’m seeing her for the first time. When she leaves for the bathroom, Tasha smokes a cigarette and flicks the ashes out of the half-open window.

  “I should quit,” she says. “It’s horrible for my game.”

  “Why did Nisha stop playing?” I ask.

  Tasha lowers her voice. “I think her parents found out. It wasn’t pretty. I keep trying to get her to come out to JP more. It can’t be good for her to be stuck in the house with her parents all the time.”
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  “They’ve always been strict.” Nisha had an eight-o’clock bedtime all through high school. She wasn’t allowed to wear shorts or skirts above her knees. The only time she could go out with her friends was when I was invited along.

  •••

  During the second half of the game, Nisha and I walk around the edge of the pitch to stave off the cold. Neither of us have jackets. The cool air sinks into our skin and stays there.

  She walks fast around the pitch. I lightly touch her elbow and she stops.

  “Amma wants us to have a sangeet as part of the wedding,” she says. “I’d have to perform a dance.”

  I thread my fingers through hers. “Will Deepak dance with you?”

  She winds a hand around my neck. “I miss dancing with you.”

  “I can’t dance at the sangeet with you.”

  Her eyes light up. “But you can dance with me now.” She pulls me away from the pitch and down past a thicket of bushes.

  The noise of the game dies into a muffle. Nisha sits down in a clearing that looks like it’s designed for team meetings before games. She unzips her boots and takes them off. I untie my shoes and step out of them. She finds a song on her phone. She turns up the volume and leaves it in the grass.

  “Ready?” She takes her position.

  “What song?”

  “Our song.” She misses the first beat of the drum, but catches up quickly.

  It’s a routine we choreographed for the Boston Tamil Arts Festival. A two-person dance from a Rajnikanth movie about misplaced love and vengeance. Appropriate.

  She remembers her parts well. I try to keep up. I’m not used to moving this way anymore, bending at the waist or curving with the violin notes. Nisha dances like she’s never stopped. Barefoot in the grass, her face making all the right emotions to the lyrics. Her legs lift with the drums, leaping and dancing around me.

  I’d played the male part, the object of the female dancer’s affection, who had wanted a different girl instead, a girl too shy to dance in public. A good, modest servant girl who, in the music video, edged around the walls of the dance floor casting coy glances at the hero.