“You were saying that anger is a good thing,” Girish filled in patiently. “Maybe you got endometriosis because you’re so angry all the time.”
Girish had been a broken man when he heard the news, and tried to convince Shobha that adoption would be the solution. She wouldn’t hear of it. “If I can’t have my own child then maybe this is nature’s way of saying that I shouldn’t have children. Not mine, not anyone else’s.” Their relationship deteriorated after that.
Devi wondered if she should call Shobha to say good-bye. They never really got along, not like sisters did in movies, in other people’s families, in books. They were distant, and Devi had a strong inkling that Shobha genuinely disliked her.
She dialed Shobha’s cell phone number, always a reliable way of getting in touch with her and the best way to avoid speaking with Girish, who could answer if she called their home phone. The fewer people she had to say good-bye to, the easier this would be. But even as Shobha’s cell phone rang, Devi knew she was procrastinating. On the sixth ring, right before Shobha’s voice mail would click in, Devi hung up, threw the phone down on the couch, and stood up. It was time, she told herself firmly. It had been time for a while now.
Devi was not the first person in her family to attempt suicide. Thirty-eight years ago Ramakant, Devi’s grandfather, hung himself from the ceiling fan in his brother’s house with one of his exwife’s silk saris. Vasu had never forgiven Ramakant for killing himself just three months after the divorce. The blame fell squarely on her, and everyone merrily overlooked the fact that Ramakant was obviously unbalanced. Adding insult to injury was the suicide note, in which Ramakant took great pains to specifically explain how his ex-wife was not the reason why he was doing himself in and that he loved and respected Vasu very much.
Devi decided in the beginning that if she ever killed herself it would be without a suicide note—no melodrama for the damned. This was a personal business, a private affair, no one needed to know why. Sure, her family may think she owed them an explanation, but that was an unreasonable expectation compounded by Devi’s perverse desire to keep them guessing. Her parents may have brought her into the world (and that, too, without her permission), but it was her choice when she left.
She wanted to leave now.
It wasn’t like she woke up one day and thought, Oh, it’s a good idea if I kill myself today. No, it took several months before she reached this point. It started like a spark of electricity, something that happens when wiring goes bad. And once the idea popped into her head, she couldn’t unpop it, no matter how hard she tried. No matter how hard she shook her head to clear it away, it stayed, and soon became a constant companion.
Everything seemed to be an omen, giving her the green go-ahead signal to die.
The computer crashed again. Damn, if only I was dead, I wouldn’t have to deal with this shit.
I locked the car keys inside the car. Damn, if only I was dead, I wouldn’t have to call Triple A.
It’s a Friday night and I have no one to go out with. If only I’d killed myself in the morning then I wouldn’t have to deal with this loneliness in the evening.
So on and so forth.
Devi had it all planned, the method (this after some serious pondering), the time of day (though this kept changing), and the place. But in all her planning, Devi didn’t account for one mistake she had made a year ago. She gave Saroj a spare set of keys to her town house in Redwood City. Saroj had virtually beaten the keys out of Devi when she’d rented the place; nagged the hell out of her until Devi relented.
“You have to give us a spare set of keys. If you lose yours you will have to pay your landlord all that money to get new keys . . . this way, everything will be nice and easy.”
It hadn’t been quite nice’n easy as the hair-coloring commercial promised. It had been a nightmare. Saroj quickly forgot her guarantee to Devi that she wouldn’t enter Devi’s house using the spare key and did exactly that. The first time was with a box of ladoos.
Devi was shocked to see her mother in the dining area putting a box of ladoos on the table while Devi struggled to cover herself with a towel and hold on to a baseball bat, convinced that someone had broken in while she was in the shower.
When asked why she didn’t just ring the doorbell, Saroj spluttered something about having done that and then, having not gotten a response and seeing the driveway empty, using her key.
Devi reminded Saroj that she had a garage and therefore didn’t park her car in the driveway. Saroj just held up the ladoos and asked peevishly, “So, you don’t want the ladoos?”
Devi sighed and said it was okay this one time, but who was she kidding, the visits soon became a habit. Sometimes Devi would come home and there would be new Indian food items in her fridge and a long message from her mother on her answering machine explaining why Saroj just had to use her set of keys to put the perishable food in the fridge.
So it would have been prudent of Devi to have set the deadbolt from the inside that morning to prevent an unwanted visitor. However, new food hadn’t appeared in her fridge for a whole month and Devi didn’t think of her mother’s trespassing ways.
Devi sat down at the edge of the claw-foot bathtub, one of the reasons why she’d wanted to rent the house despite the exorbitant price the landlord was asking. She turned the delicate, antique brass water faucet, her fingers caressing the water as the thick drops fell. After a steady stream of cold water poured into the tub, wet heat began to stroke her hand. Deciding that the temperature was right, she rose and realized how insane it was to ensure the temperature of the water was right when she was going to do what she was going to do. How did it matter?
She tightened her robe one more time as her glance fell on the beautiful ivory-handled knife she’d purchased in Chinatown several years ago. She bought it because it looked fancy and was expensive. She’d accepted her first real job offer with her first start-up and they were paying well. She wanted to buy herself something silly, something expensive, and the ivory-handled knife caught her eye for all those reasons. At the time she would’ve never thought how handy it could be, how the sharpness that surprised and annoyed her would work to her advantage.
“Am I sure?” she asked herself and waited for a resonating answer in her mind.
She stood in front of the floor-length mirror, loosened her robe, and let it fall. Naked, she saw the small bulge of her tummy, her slight breasts, a constant cause of embarrassment, her curly, dark pubic hair that grew at a rapid rate, another cause of embarrassment.
“This is me,” she said out loud and removed the elastic band that held her shoulder-length hair in place. “I’m ready,” she told herself with a small smile.
Compared to all that had slipped away like a chimera through her fingers, losing her life didn’t seem too monumental. She sucked back the tears that were ready to fall on her cheeks. She wasn’t going to cry. This was the right thing, the only thing, and she wasn’t going to let any doubt enter her through those tears.
She dropped lavender bath beads inside the tub with some self-amusement. How would it matter how the bathwater smelled when soon, it would smell and look like blood? The thought and the realization that blood would be everywhere allowed nausea to creep in. She battled against it, just as she had the tears.
She lay down in the tub and took a deep breath before dipping her head in. The water soothed her, relaxed her, and she floated for a while, her mind empty of thought, her hearty empty of emotions. She held her breath for as long as she could under the water and then, when oxygen became vital, she pulled herself out.
Slowly, she rested against the bottom of the tub and raised both her hands up. They were wet and slick. She picked up the knife from the edge of the bathtub.
She ran her left thumb over the blade and felt the instant tearing of skin, gushing of blood. Carelessly, she washed the blood away in the lavender water.
She lifted her right hand and looked at the wrist carefully. This was the last
time she would see it like this, unmarked. This was the last time for everything.
With the precision she’d always been known for, Devi took the knife in her left hand and slowly made a deep vertical cut on her right wrist, tearing open the vein that would lead her to death.
Two things happened after the Devi “incident,” as everyone in the Veturi household started calling it:
Devi completely stopped talking.
Devi started cooking.
Two things she did with such intensity and consistency that it drove her already shaken family up the wall.
AMULYA MALLADI has a bachelor’s degree in engineering and a master’s degree in journalism. Born and raised in India, she lived in the United States for several years before moving to Denmark, where she now lives on the island of Mors with her husband and sons. You can contact her at www.amulyamalladi.com.
The Mango Season is a work of fiction. Names,
places, and incidents either are products of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2003 by Amulya Malladi
Reader’s Guide copyright © 2004 by Amulya Malladi and
Random House, Inc.
Excerpt from Serving Crazy with Curry
copyright © 2004 by Amulya Malladi
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States
by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random
House Publishing Group, a division of Random
House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously
in Canada by Random House of
Canada Limited, Toronto.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc. Ballantine Reader’s Circle and colophon
are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com/BRC
Library of Congress Control Number is available
upon request from the publisher.
eISBN : 978-0-307-41723-7
www.randomhouse.com
v1.0
The Mango Season Page 23