In the Convent of Little Flowers

by Indu Sundaresan

  Sunny is chewing bubble gum, blowing bubbles in thick pink circles, and then peeling them with a magenta-painted fingernail from her nose and mouth. Her T-shirt gapes at her stomach.

  “What the hell are you doing dressed like that?” Prakrit is really angry now, red flushes on his neck. When did that neck grow fat?

  “Like what, Daddy?” Another chew and cheeks puffed to blow.

  “Throw away that disgusting stuff. Where is your respect for your elders? Why didn’t you pass your Maths exam?”

  “Saroj Miss does not like me, that’s why.” She leans against the wall on one skinny hip (how thin she is) and folds her arms across her chest.

  They fight, back and forth. Prakrit demanding respect, Sunny stubbornly refusing to give it. Eventually, Sunny’s face crumples into tears and she turns and runs back to the bedroom.

  Prakrit slouches, muttering to himself, as he loosens the tie from his grime-rimmed collar with a thick finger. Once he lets me do this for him, watching my hands tug at the knot, slipsliding the tie from his neck. He is full of smiles, bending to bite my fingers, all this even after the children are born. Once.

  A blast of music deafens the flat as Dinesh opens his bedroom door.

  “Hi, Daddy. My homework is done.” He comes to us carrying a miniature silver cup. “Elocution at school. First prize.” He’s like Prakrit, more like him than Sunny. Dinesh has his father’s squat figure, the heavy brows, that sun-bright smile. But as much as Prakrit tries to teach him what it is to be a man, Dinesh is still more mine than his. That will never change. Now Dinesh comes to be petted and patted. We both praise him; I’ve seen the cup three times already, once when he waved it under Sunny’s just-failed-Maths nose. Then Sunny glared at him and marched off, and Dinesh ran to his room to get her the comic book they have been fighting over. Without my telling him.

  When Dinesh leaves, Prakrit rises to go to the bedroom and says over his shoulder, “Get the bai to come in for the night. We are going to The Tapping Foot at ten o’clock.”

  “Prakrit!” I run after him but he is already in the bathroom, his shoes kicked off at the door, his socks on the floor, his tie, his shirt (redolent of him) and his pants on the bed.

  He switches on the water heater and starts to lather his chin.

  “A disc? We are going to a disc at our age?”

  He looks at me in the mirror. “All the managers are going with their wives. The MD wants to see me there. Wear something nice. Not Indian. Western.” He bends down again.

  I am still standing at the door when he shuts it. I turn away in slow steps. First the bai.

  Munshi is sleeping on the parapet in front of the building when I come out of the lift, his Nehru cap over his eyes. He does not even raise it as he says, “Bai taken already, memsahib. By 15A, memsahib.”

  “Get up, Munshi. Get up and stand when you talk to me.”

  He bolts upright, the venom in my voice frightening him. But soon that slow, insolent smile. “Bai will not come to your flat tonight, memsahib.”

  “We’ll see.” I walk around the compound wall and down the little mound of dirt into the slum where our bai lives. She sees me coming but continues to chop a cauliflower, her latest child suckling at her breast. She’s barely respectful in the flat, working for me, now even less so. As I near she spits out a red streak of paan on the ground next to her. A TV blares inside her shack and her three older children sit on the floor, eyes pinned to the color screen. A satellite dish (do I pay her that much?) pokes out of the thatched roof.

  “Bai, the sahib and I are going out tonight. I need you to come and look after the children.”

  “Not possible, memsahib. I have to take care of my children.”

  “Bai, please. Just this one time.”

  She unlatches the baby from her breast, tucks it under her blouse, swings him around, and pulls out the other breast. I look away. When she first has this child, I do not allow her to bring him into the flat while she works, for she stops often to feed his cries. Dinesh and Sunny halt whatever they are doing, which is usually lounging on the sofa gorging themselves on comics, and gape at that brown nipple. She thinks I am cruel, but I am just practical. I don’t want my children, then perhaps my husband, looking at another woman’s breast, even if she is only a bai.

  We go back and forth in that slum, as the other servants come out to stare at me, pricing my gold bangles, my mangalsutra, my diamond earrings, and my Bata sandals from their shack doors. The bai settles eventually for two hundred rupees and two Sundays off. I wonder how much the 15A memsahib promised the bai. They live one floor above us, but the memsahib is cheap. Obviously.

  The disc is on the ground floor of the Maha Taj hotel. It reeks of an opulence that makes my skin cold. Heavy glass doors. A gold-and-red-brocade-clad doorman with upturned Jodhpur slippers on his feet and a plumed gold zari turban on his head. Like a bridegroom or a decked-out horse. He opens the door for us with one hand, the other clasps Prakrit’s hand as a fifty-rupee note passes between them. First Munshi, now this man. I should be doing this job. How hard can it be to heave a well-oiled door open and look stupidly magnificent? We pass into the frigid marble-floored lobby. The receptionists lounge over polished granite counters, dulcet-voiced, dutifully ignoring us. Five-star hotels don’t have five-star receptions for less-than-managing-director types like us.

  “Prakrit.” I hold on to the sleeve of his cotton shirt. He looks clean after his bath, like the man who came to see me all those years ago at the law office. Today he uses the last of his American cologne and the smell sticks around me. “Let’s go home.”

  “Don’t be silly, Nitu.” He peels my fingers away and holds me at a distance. Early on he would touch me often, bringing red flushes of embarrassment over my skin. In public, that is. In front of my mother and father who looked away disapprovingly. In front of his parents who smirked at the evidence that their son was having sex. This is what touching in public means, sex, not affection. This is why I blush. I know this too.

  “We have to go in. You look fine. Don’t worry.”

  I am wearing pants and a halter shirt. Prakrit does not let me wear a sari or a salwar, too Indian, not Western enough, we’re going to a disc for God’s sake, Nitu, not a temple. Dress appropriately.

  I haven’t worn this shirt in many years; I think my breasts are too heavy, bulging over the front. I adjust the straps and slink into the disc behind Prakrit. Noise blasts out at us, drowning everything.

  “Over there!” Prakrit yells in my ear, and I feel my eardrum reverberate painfully.

  Strobe lights in blue, green, red, and purple puncture the darkened room. A silver ball glitters in the center of the ceiling. The music, cacophonous, is a thud of techno-funk. Boom. Boom. Boom. Over and over again. No other rhythm, no voices, no singing. Just a guitar and a heavy set of drums. We cleave through wedges of people; I see Prakrit’s back appear and disappear.

  Someone puts a thick arm across my front and says, “Wanna dance, baby?”

  America has come to India now, thank you, MTV. Sunny and Dinesh, unprompted, will say Mom I am ass-king you. I still say aahsk, not ass. When I aahsk them what ass is, they are all giggles and Mom you are so old.

  I turn to look at the hairless-faced boy. “Are you mad?” I yell into his ear. “You’re young enough to be my son.”

  He mouths, I like mamas.

  “Nitu.” Prakrit grabs my hand. The boy frames a V with his fingers—peace, man, didn’t mean to hit on your old lady. Prakrit drags me away and I stumble on my spiked heels. Everyone in the disc is years younger. Their faces are vapid, drug-hazed, their arms and legs flail, hair flies about their shoulders. The girls wear too much skin and too little clothing.

  The others are waiting for us in a dim alcove. Glasses litter the table, some rimmed with half-lips in lipstick. The MD sits in the middle of the semicircular booth, his wife on one side, his secretary, all pale skin and strappy dress, on the other side.

  “This is the yo
uth of today, Prakrit,” he bawls, his smooth domed head glittering in the fast-moving light of the room. “From here will come the future of the company.”

  From these children who dance with such abandon, who are so deafened by the sound that they do not need to think, just act. The MD has already had too many drinks. His wife looks furious as his hand brushes the secretary’s thigh, as his bleary eyes rest too long on the scooped neckline of her silver lamé dress.

  We sit and Prakrit mimes two gin and tonics to the waiter. It is what the MD is drinking. I hate gin—water with a kick. A taste of metal. I want wine, but I drink gin.

  My head gets slowly accustomed to the roar of music, my eyes still reel from the flash of colors, but if I look into my drink, it is not so bad. Everyone is watching the children on the dance floor. In a few years, Sunny and Dinesh will be here. Boom. Boom. Boom. Moving to a rhythm that makes no sense to me, Prakrit’s old lady. I see the others from the company to one side of the floor. They are all shuffling, dutifully twitching shoulders, one even does a John Travolta stance, pelvis kicked out, one arm bent, the other high in the air. The children who see him giggle. They get closer to one another, hips moving in mimicry of sex, the boys’ eyes lustful and vague, as though in the throes of passion. There is a hunger in them. A bare-naked hunger on the edge of starvation. It is so stark, it is embarrassing. A hunger that makes them forget etiquette and rules, and in doing so, makes them mesmerizing to me. They laugh at the company people. Mehta from accounting, who just got promoted, stomps his feet, his diminutive Diwali-sweets-making wife stomps faithfully along with him, ill-at-ease and poured into a green silk jumpsuit that barely contains her.

  “Go! Go, dance!” the MD shouts, patting Prakrit on the back.

  Just then a hand touches my neck. I turn to see the girl. Her T-shirt is black this time, off the shoulders, her waist bare. She has a ring in her navel. “Hi.”

  “Prakrit, this is—”

  But he is rising already, and almost overturns his G&T. Looking very manly. He shakes her hand and I hear her say, “Sheela, Jai’s wife.”

  “Do you want to dance, Sheela?” he yells.

  “Yes, but with your wife. Come.” She pulls me up.

  I shake my head with a fury. “No. No. No. You two go. I will watch.”

  “No fun that way. Come.”

  We fight our way to the floor. The music is louder now, harsher. I am still shaking my head and she is laughing. “You’re not that old, you know.”

  In the skittering light I watch her as I shift my weight from one foot to another. She is wearing a black chiffon skirt that swirls around her, an armlet of glittering stone on one naked arm. When she lifts her hands to clap I see clean armpits without even a shadow of hair. She has gold eyeshadow on, and little sparkles of metal in her foundation that catch the light as she turns her face. I watch her.

  She leans over and says, “Come to the bathroom.”

  We melt into the crowd to the bathroom in one corner. We piss. We don’t talk. When I come out, she is waiting, leaning against the sink. I wash my hands, thinking, She doesn’t love Jai. She doesn’t love Jai. Somehow that thought shatters me. When I reach for the towel, she takes it from me and wipes my hands carefully as I have done for Sunny and Dinesh when they are younger. As I still sometimes do. But her touch is nothing like mine, nothing that is motherly. When she is done, she continues to hold my hands. I want this. I want this with a hunger I did not know I had.

  I am crying now, looking down at my hands and crying with tears that do not seem to stop. Sheela leans over and licks the tears from my face, slowly, without fear. I wait. I watch her. She kisses me on the mouth. A gentle kiss. Of love and affection. Of lust that blasts me out of my world into a space of a million crushed pieces that seem to mirror what I once was.

  “Not like that, Nitu.” My mother pins the sari pallu onto the shoulder of my blouse. It is yellow, a dark thick yellow that someone a hundred shades lighter than I should wear. Like Laila down the street with her bevy of suitors she rejects, inviting a flurry of who-does-she-think-she-is and does-she-think-she-will-find-a-good-husband-just-like-that-eh. My yellow sari brings out blotches on my face under the caking of too-white talcum powder and the pink lipstick framing my too-thin lips painted by my mother with a paintbrush as the women’s magazines tell her to.

  They are late, Prakrit and his parents, two hours late. By this time lines of sweat run ragged down my face. The potato and brinjal bhajjias lie desiccated on the center table, the chai is cold and skinned with cream, my mother is silent for once, my father reads the same page of the newspaper in his favorite chair, over and over again. I can sense them thinking, number seven, and this time he did not even come to see our daughter. I do not tell them of meeting Prakrit at work. If I had, my mother will now be imagining all kinds of things— sex, conception perhaps, daughter’s reputation ruined.

  Laila’s mother comes, all clucks and concern, so sorry, they did not come, so sorry to hear that. All smiles. Her Laila says that the boy’s side must respect us too. Such ideas, but she is so beautiful, only a matter of time before she goes from us to a big and rich house. Perhaps, and she hesitates delicately, and we must know how this is torn from her, how unwillingly she says this, but Nitu is so much like her own Laila, and so she will force herself to say to Nitu what she would say to her own daughter. Perhaps my mother and father should look … a little lower. America-return boy may be too high. For Nitu’s good.

  Five minutes after she leaves, Prakrit and his parents come. My mother calls out to them aloud, loud enough for the street to hear. She leans out into the sunshine hoping Laila’s mother has not reached her house yet.

  We twitter around them, as my mother blooms again. Prakrit’s mother does not smile; she is dour, assessing, her eyes cold. She does not have to smile to please; she has an America-return son for sale. There are many buyers.

  I am deeply in love, uncaring how ill-mannered his mother is. I know it will be Prakrit and with him America and dollars. How I do not know. I just know. My mother, so anxious to please, lies that I made the bhajjias and boiled the chai and pounded the cloves and cinnamon with my own two hands.

  Prakrit and I do not look at each other. We are very solemn. I keep my eyes down, demure and bridelike; he talks intelligently with my father, filling our little drawing room with his so-American twang. I am in love.

  The wedding takes place one week later. My mother comes into my room the night before I am to be married, sits on my bed, and stutters. I hear vague words, woman’s duty, never deny your husband, touch his feet, rise before him, have his coffee ready when he wakes up, never raise your voice at him. She leaves, having satisfied herself that she has done her job as a mother in preparing me for a marriage that must last my whole life, unsaid, even in this modern age, is that if Prakrit (God forbid) dies, I must still keep faithful to his memory. A husband comes only once in a lifetime. All this, my mother teaches me in those fifteen minutes the night before I marry.

  We honeymoon in Goa. The sun bleaches the sands to salt white, deepens the blue of the Arabian Sea. We sit under palm leaf–thatched umbrellas, go for walks at dusk. Prakrit searches out Australians and Americans and British and Dutch and French and speaks to them over drinks at the bar. They laugh together, the foreigners happy to find someone who speaks English a little like they do, Prakrit missing his job and his home in the Unied States. At night, he does things to me that excite me. And repulse me.

  For two months I do not answer the phone. And when I do, if I hear Sheela’s voice on the other end, I put it down. I am filled with loathing. I am filled with want. Nights I lie awake, listening to Prakrit’s heavy breathing, and think she is six floors below. When she calls, the way she says my name sets me shaking. When she kissed me I did not pull away, did not scream in outrage. I kissed her back.

  But how did I not know this about myself? All of my friends growing up were girls—we played together, slept in the same bed at times, kissed
on the cheeks at others. We swooned over the same film star. Nothing in my life has prepared me for this. I was told that I would grow up to marry, to have children. I saw this all around me. I saw nothing else, I read of nothing like this as a child, or watched it in a movie. I know now, of course, have known for a few years, since I married and stepped out of the cocoon of my childhood home. And yet … I did not know this of myself.

  I wander around the flat after the children and Prakrit are gone, dusting the tables and curios. A green plastic Statue of Liberty Prakrit got from his New York trip. The photo next to it is of him standing in front of the statue. A smattering of rain on the camera lens blurs his face. I polish my silver teapot and six cups that came as part of my dowry. I buff the wood almirah where I keep my saris and Prakrit’s suits, also part of my dowry. The dining table, the chairs, the sofa, the carpet, all came from my parents. Prakrit’s mother brought a list during the meeting before the wedding. They gave my parents three days to get all this together, before the ceremony. Or else.

  There are other photos on the walls. Us together at Goa. I am wearing a salwar kameez, Prakrit looks grim and red-eyed, weeping from a gust of sand in his eyes. But on the whole we look happy. Then I was thinking of four more days with Prakrit before he returns to the United States. We register our wedding and Prakrit sends the papers to the American embassy for my visa. He is so solicitous, so caring. This is what marriage is supposed to be, where he will take care of me. Laila’s mother is shattered with envy that the dark girl down the street is going to America to live. That she will come back maybe once a year with a trunk full of perfumy soaps and shampoos, that my mother will flaunt these smells when they meet. That I will slowly, over the years, say heere and call myself Neetoo.