Arranged Marriage

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  “No,” I would tell them, smoothing my silk Yves St. Laurent jersey over my own gratifyingly slim hips. “Most emphatically no.”

  But I could see they didn’t believe me.

  Nor did my mother, who had for years been trying to arrange my marriage with a nice Indian boy. Every month she sent me photos of eligible young men, nephews and second cousins of friends and neighbors, earnest, mustachioed men in stiff-collared shirts with slicked-back Brylcreem hair. She accompanied these photographs with warnings (I wasn’t getting any younger; soon I’d be thirty and then who would want me?) and laments (look at Roma-auntie, her daughter was expecting her third, while thanks to me, she remained deprived of grandchildren). When I wrote back that I wasn’t ready to settle down (I didn’t say anything about Richard, which would have upset her even more), she decried my crazy western notions. “I should never have given in and allowed you to go to America,” she wrote, underlining the never in emphatic red.

  In spite of the brief twinge of guilt I felt when yet another fat packet with a Calcutta postmark arrived from my mother, I knew I was right. Because in Indian marriages becoming a wife was only the prelude to that all-important, all-consuming event—becoming a mother. That wasn’t why I’d fought so hard—with my mother to leave India; with my professors to make it through graduate school; with my bosses to establish my career. Not that I was against marriage—or even against having a child. I just wanted to make sure that when it happened, it would be on my own terms, because I wanted it.

  Meanwhile I heaved a sigh of relief whenever I came away from the baby-houses (that’s how I thought of them, homes ruled by tiny red-faced tyrants with enormous lung power). Back in my own cool, clean living room I would put on a Ravi Shankar record or maybe a Chopin nocturne, change into the blue silk kimono that Richard had given me, and curl up on my fawn buffed-leather sofa. As the soothing strains of sitar or piano washed over me, I would close my eyes and think of what we’d planned for that evening, Richard and I. And I would thank God for my life, which was as civilized, as much in control, as perfect, as a life could ever be.

  The boy changed all that.

  He was crouched under the stairwell when I found him, on my way out of the building for my regular 6 A.M. jog around the rose gardens with Richard. I would have missed him completely had he not coughed just as I reached the door. He had wedged himself into the far end of the dark triangular recess, so that all I saw at first was a small, huddled shape and the glint of terrified eyes. And thought, Wild animal. Later I would wonder how I must have appeared to him, a large, loud, bent-over figure in pink sweats with hair swinging wildly about her face, ordering him to come out of there right now, demanding where did you come from and how did you get past the security door. Only probably he didn’t understand a word.

  By the time I got him out, my Liz Claiborne suit was ruined, my cheek stung where he had scratched me, and my watch said 6:20. Richard, I thought with dismay, because he didn’t like to be kept waiting. Then the boy claimed my attention again.

  He looked about seven, though he could have been older. He was so thin it was hard to tell. His collarbones stuck out from under his filthy shirt, and in the hollow between them I could see a pulse beating frantically. Ragged black hair fell into eyes that stared at me unblinkingly. He didn’t seem to comprehend anything I said, not even when I switched to halting Spanish, and when I leaned forward, he flinched and flung up a thin brown arm to protect his face.

  What am I going to do with him, I wondered desperately. It was getting late. I’d already missed my morning jog, and if I didn’t get back to my apartment pretty soon, I wouldn’t have time for my sit-ups either. Then I had to wash my hair—there was a big meeting at the bank, and I was scheduled to make the opening presentation. I hadn’t figured out what kind of power-outfit to wear, either. I closed my eyes and hoped the boy would just disappear the way he had appeared, but when I opened them, he was there still, watching me warily.

  I unlocked my apartment door but didn’t enter right away. I was afraid of what I might find. Then I said to myself, How could it be any worse? I’d been late to work (a first). I’d run into the meeting room, out of breath, my unwashed hair falling into my eyes, my spreadsheets all out of order. My presentation had been second-rate at best (another first), and when Dan Luftner, Head of Loans, who’d been waiting for years to catch me out, asked me for an update on the monthly statements software the bank had purchased a while back, I’d been unable to give him an adequate answer. “Why, Meera,” he’d said, raising his eyebrows in mock surprise, “I thought you knew everything!” I smarted all morning at the memory of the triumph in his eyes, and when a customer asked a particularly stupid question, I snapped at him. “Are you feeling all right, Meera?” said my supervisor, who had overheard. “Maybe you should take the rest of the day off.” So here I was in the middle of the afternoon, with the mother of all headaches pounding its way across my skull.

  I’m going to spend the rest of the day in bed, I decided, with the curtains drawn, the phone off the hook, a handkerchief soaked in eau de cologne on my forehead, and strict instructions to the boy to not disturb me. When my headache gets better, I’m going to listen to the new Dvorak record which Richard gave me for Valentine’s day. Everything else—including calling Richard to explain why I hadn’t shown up—I’ll handle later.

  As soon as I opened the door I was struck by the smell. It was worse than ten baby-houses put together. I followed my nose to the bathroom. There was pee all over the floor, a big yellow puddle, with blobs of brown floating in it.

  I went into the kitchen, took two aspirin, then another one. I grabbed the mop and bucket and a bottle of Pine Sol and went looking for the boy, rehearsing all the things I was going to tell him. You little savage, didn’t I explain to you how to use the toilet before I left, at least ten times, in clear sign language? That’s what made me late this morning, messed up my presentation. If I don’t get chosen as employee of the month like I was the last three times, it’s going to be all your fault I was going to make him clean up the bathroom as well. But first I was going to shake him until his teeth rattled in his stupid head.

  “You should have turned him over to the super that same morning,” Richard would tell me later. “You should never have brought him into your apartment at all. I can’t figure out why you did it—it isn’t like you at all.”

  Richard was right, of course, on both counts. I’ve never been given to the easy sentimentality of taking in strays—I know my own fastidiousness, the limits to my patience. The first thought I’d had when I saw the boy was that I should call the super. Mr. Leroy, a large, not unkind man with children of his own, would have known what to do with the boy. Better than I did, certainly.

  So why didn’t I make that call? Did my decision have something to do with the boy’s enormous eyes, the way he fixed them on my face? The way his thin shoulders had trembled, there, under the staircase, when I touched them? Did a part of me, that treacherous Indian side that believed in the workings of karma, feel that the universe had brought him to my door for a special reason? I’m not sure. But even now, as I searched the apartment angrily, I knew I couldn’t send him away.

  I finally found him behind the drapes in the bedroom. He shrank against the wall when he saw me. I could hear the hiss of his indrawn breath, see his shoulders stiffen. He made a small moaning sound that seemed to go on and on.

  “Oh shit.” I gave a short laugh as the appropriateness of my expression struck me. “Don’t look so scared, for God’s sake. Just don’t do it again, OK? And now I guess you’d better take a bath.”

  “Sharmila,” I said on the phone, “what’s a good place to buy clothes for kids?”

  “Why d’you want to know? You planning to have one?”

  “Very funny. Actually, my brother’s son is visiting, and …” My voice trailed away guiltily. I’d never lied to Sharmila before. But the boy was my special secret. I wasn’t ready to share him with an
yone yet.

  “Your brother! Didn’t you tell me once you were an only child?”

  “Did I? Maybe I’d just had a fight with him or something.”

  “Hmm,” said Sharmila, obviously unconvinced. “Well, how old is the boy? Some stores are better for babies, and others …”

  “He looks like he’s about seven …”

  “Looks like? You don’t know your own nephew’s age?”

  “So I’m not as close to my family as you are, Madam Perfect,” I shouted. “I’m sorry I asked.” I slammed down the phone, then took it off the hook. Sharmila would surely call back to find out why I, who never got upset, not even the time when the bank computer suddenly swallowed the information on five hundred and sixty-three accounts, was behaving so strangely. She might even decide to drive over. And I was afraid of what she would say when she found out about the boy.

  I looked over to the kitchen table and met the boy’s worried eyes. “It’s OK,” I said. “I’m not mad at you.” I smiled at him until the frown line between his brows faded. I was pleased to see that he’d eaten most of the large egg sandwich I’d fixed him and that he’d drunk all his milk. He looked a lot better after his bath, with his hair all shiny and his face clean, and weren’t the circles under his eyes a little lighter?

  The bath had been difficult. He wouldn’t go into the tub by himself, so I had to make him. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I kept saying. Still, when I took off his shirt, he struggled and trembled, with that same moaning sound, holding on to his tattered pants until I said, “OK, OK, keep them on.” I put him in the tub and started soaping him, and that’s when I felt them, the puckers of old burns along his back. Cigarettes? Who? I tried to imagine someone—a man? a woman?—holding him down, his body trembling like a caught bird’s under the enormous press of that adult arm, the burning butt jabbed into his back over and over until he stopped making even that thin, whimpering sound. Then I was crying, holding him tight and crying, the lukewarm sudsy water soaking my white Givenchy blouse that I’d forgotten to change out of, and I didn’t even care.

  We’d made it through the bath somehow, and now he was dressed in a pair of my cutoffs tied around his middle with my kimono belt and an aquamarine Moschino shirt that hung almost to his knees. On his feet he wore my old Hawaiian sandals.

  “What the heck,” I said, forcing a smile onto my face. “There’s a lot of folks out there dressed more weirdly than you. Let’s go shopping. Ever heard of Macy’s, kid?”

  But all the while I was thinking, Could it have been someone in his family? Could it have been his father? Could it—God help us all—have been his mother?

  When the doorbell rang with the two impatient double buzzes I knew to be Sharmila’s, I was fixing lunch: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and alphabet soup. I didn’t know if the boy knew his ABCs yet, or if he cared for peanut butter, but generations of children on TV shows seemed to thrive on them, so they couldn’t be too bad. I wondered if I could get away with not answering, but now Sharmila was pounding on the door.

  “Nothing to worry,” I told the boy, who’d jumped up from his chair and backed into the corner by the refrigerator. “You get started on the soup while it’s hot.”

  “Knew you were in here,” said Sharmila, pushing past me. She seemed to be carrying an entire household on her back, but on a closer look I saw it was only the baby, wrapped in a quilt and positioned inside some kind of sack that seemed to double as a diaper bag as well. “I knew something was really wrong when I called the bank and they said you’d taken a day off. You never take a day off.”

  I mumbled something about having accumulated a lot of vacation time.

  “Right,” said Sharmila. “And I was born yesterday. Here, help me get this damn thing off. I swear it weighs a ton. No, Mummy’s not complaining about you, raja beta, just your baggage.” This last was to the baby, who looked like he was getting ready to scream. But before he could, Sharmila adroitly popped a pacifier into his mouth and turned toward the kitchen. “So this is the young man,” she said.

  “His name is Krishna,” I said, struck by a happy inspiration. I needed to give him a name anyway (he didn’t seem to have one), and that of a demon-destroying god who was raised by a foster mother seemed a good choice. This way, his friends at school could call him Kris.

  “For heaven’s sake, Meera, the boy doesn’t even look Indian. Now tell me the whole story and don’t you dare leave anything out.”

  By the time I finished, the shadows from the pepper tree outside slanted across the room. Sharmila wiped at her eyes. She picked up her baby and held him close for a long moment. The baby gurgled with laughter and Krishna, who’d been hovering around him all afternoon, reached out to touch his chubby hand. The baby grabbed his finger. Krishna, too, was laughing now—for the first time, I told Sharmila.

  “Maybe he used to have a little brother or sister, poor kid,” said Sharmila, watching him play with her son. Then she turned to me. “I know how you feel, Meera, but you can’t just keep him….”

  “Why not?” I said, talking fast. I didn’t want to hear what was coming next. I was afraid her words would echo the objections I’d kept pushing to the back of my own mind. “I can give him a good home. I can …”

  “What if he’s lost? Maybe his family’s looking for him right now….”

  I felt a pang of guilt. Then I shrugged it off resolutely. Angrily. So what if they were, I thought, remembering the burn marks. But I only said, “He looked like he’d been on his own a long time.”

  “Even then, sooner or later he’ll have to go to school, and then you’ll need a birth certificate, a social security number, something to show that you’re his guardian….”

  “What if I move someplace where no one knows us? What if I say I lost all our papers in a fire?”

  “Meera,” Sharmila said patiently, “you know that won’t work. Maybe it would have in India, but not here, where everyone keeps records—hospitals, doctors. No, you’ve got to do it the legal way.”

  “Adoption! That’s out of the question!” exclaimed Richard, so sharply that heads turned toward our table.

  I pushed away my half-eaten dinner, although it was grilled salmon with a light almond sauce on the side, which I particularly like.

  “Why? Why is it out of the question?” My voice was sharp, too—mostly to hide my dismay. There was a cold, leaden heaviness in the pit of my stomach. I’d expected some arguments, but I hadn’t thought Richard would be so strongly opposed to my plan. In fact, I’d hoped he’d help me iron out the details, once we’d talked things over. I was shaken by how disapproving his voice sounded, how final and filled with distaste. And he hadn’t even met Krishna.

  We were dining at Le Gourmand, which is a bit too fancy for me with its French menu (they’ll give you one in English if you ask, but grudgingly), its napkins edged with real lace (Belgian, Richard tells me), and an intimidating array of monogrammed silverware (there were four forks by my plate, not to count knives and spoons). But Richard really enjoys this kind of thing. And since I wanted to put him in a good mood, I’d invited him here.

  So far the evening wasn’t going well at all.

  “Stupid. You did a stupid thing, Meera, bringing him into the apartment,” Richard had said when I told him about Krishna. His tone made me bristle right away. No man was going to call me stupid and get away with it. And he sounded so avuncular, so I-know-it-all. So unlike himself. Or was this, an insidious voice inside me asked, the real Richard?

  “Stupid and dangerous,” he was saying now. “I can’t believe you’ve kept him for over a week. You could get into a lot of trouble with the law. They could bring all kinds of charges against you—kidnapping, child abuse….”

  “And since when do you know so much about the law, Mr. Perry Mason?” I broke in. The bit about child abuse had brought back too vividly the feel of those puckered scars under my fingers. I made my voice hard because I didn’t want to cry in front of Richard. “Or ha
ve you had personal experience with the charges you just mentioned?”

  I guess I didn’t sound like myself either, because Richard’s mouth opened in a brief o that made him look astonished and indignant at the same time. I could feel hysterical laughter gathering itself inside me. We were about to have our first fight. I was surprised to find that I was almost looking forward to it.

  But of course Richard is too civilized to fight. After a moment he said, his voice carefully controlled, “I can see you’re too emotional to think clearly. But this can’t go on. For one thing, how long can you keep him holed up in your apartment?”

  I thought about it. Krishna and I had established a good routine. We ate breakfast together in the mornings and watched the news. While I was at work, he amused himself by looking through the pictures in the books I brought for him from the library. When I got back from work, we usually went to the park (we’d bought ourselves a kite) or the library, or sometimes rented a video—he liked movies about animals. After dinner we’d sit together on the couch and watch it and talk about the more exciting scenes. Actually, I was the one who did all the talking. I still hadn’t got him to say anything. He wouldn’t even nod or shake his head in a yes or no. But I was sure he understood everything I said. He knew the house rules and followed them carefully: no going out on the balcony where someone could see him, no opening drawers in my bedroom, no answering the door. He had learned to use the microwave oven and the bathroom, and to make himself (and me, whenever I managed to rush home for a quick lunch) sandwiches slathered with peanut butter and jelly. And at night when I fixed dinner he liked to be near me, doing little things: breaking up the spaghetti, washing the spinach leaves, slicing the salad tomatoes into neat rounds that hinted at previous experience. Perhaps he had been used to helping his mother.