Arranged Marriage

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

“Sorry, Dadababu—there’s just too many people—and you know how they are nowadays, ready to smash the ear windows if you even touch them with a fender.”

  The wife had been trying to divert the children’s attention from the street with a game of rhymes, but as the car lurched to a halt at a corner, she glanced up. Three women were standing on the pavement, and when the car stopped one called out something to the men in front and blew them a kiss, while the other two burst into raucous laughter.

  “Disgusting,” said the husband, turning away, but the wife, who’d been staring at the woman who had spoken, drew her breath in sharply.

  “Isn’t that Sarala?” she said, and started to roll down her window.

  “What the hell are you doing!” exclaimed the husband, “Are you crazy? Don’t you realize that these are …?”

  “It’s Sarala, I’m sure it is,” said the wife, and leaning out of her window she called breathlessly, “Sarala! Sarala!”

  “Put up your window this minute,” shouted the husband. And to the driver, furiously, “Get out of here. Right now. I don’t care how you do it.”

  In the back seat, the children, scared by the shouting, had started to cry, but the wife didn’t seem to hear them. Or the sister, who was tugging at the palloo of her zari-embroidered sari, pleading for her to sit back.

  “Sarala,” she called again. She was struggling with the lock now, trying to open the door as the car inched forward.

  The woman creased her eyes and bent to peer into the car’s dark plush interior. The sister stared, fascinated, at the gaping neck of her low-cut blouse, the white powder layering the cleavage between the breasts. Fumes of cheap perfume and alcohol filled the car. The face—was it the maid’s? How could the wife seem so certain? She herself couldn’t see sufficiently past the plaster of makeup, past the jaded droop of eyelid and mouth, to be sure.

  The husband reached across from the front seat and grabbed the wife’s arm, his mouth taut with anger or fear.

  But the wife reached out through the window with her other hand, its pale, cool fingers shining with her wedding rings, toward the woman. “Sarala,” she said, “it’s me, Didi.”

  The woman stared at her for a moment, then spat. A bloodred wad of betel leaf splattered against the wife’s palm. She sat there looking at it, long after the woman had swung away, long after the husband had jerked her away from the window and ordered the sister to roll it up. After the driver, finding a fortunate gap in the crowd, had roared forward. After the sister, with shaking fingers, had scrubbed and scrubbed at her hand with a lace-edged handkerchief until no trace of the stain was left.

  “That was stupid,” the husband snapped as the car, having made it back to the main road, picked up speed. “Those women—they’re no better than animals. She could have done worse—snatched your rings, your bangles, anything.”

  “It was Sarala, I know it,” the wife said in a voice of toneless calm which frightened the sister more than any hysterical outburst.

  The husband’s mouth was an ugly gash in his face. “That was a whore, do you understand, a whore.” But his voice, thought the sister, shook the tiniest bit.

  Next morning the wife called the ayah to the storeroom and handed her the things the maid had left behind. “Burn them,” she said.

  “Everything?” asked the ayah, her voice high with shocked disapproval. “Even this?” She ran a longing hand over the flawless, petal-soft surface of the saffron sari, finer than anything she ever hoped to own.

  “Especially that,” said the wife. Her face seemed composed entirely of planes and angles, as though it would never soften into a smile again.

  “But it’s so beautiful—it would be such a waste,” said the ayah. A note at once accusing and cajoling crept into her voice. “You could maybe let me have it?”

  “Burn it,” shouted the wife. The ayah, who had never before heard her mistress raise her voice, backed away in fear. “Didn’t you hear me? Burn it right now if you want to keep your job.”

  (“Imagine!” the ayah would later say indignantly to the other servants, who had, of course, been given a full account of the evening by the driver. “She threatened to fire me. Me, who’s been working for this household twenty years, long before she came into it. And all over a sari she’d given to that slut.”

  “Shows you what strong jadu that girl worked in the short time she was here,” the cook responded, making a sign to ward off the evil eye.)

  The wife shut herself in her room and did not open the door all day and all night, not when the sister called her for lunch, not when the children, crying at naptime, came looking for her. Even when the husband, back from work, rattled the knob and said, What nonsense is this now, she remained inside, so silent that the sister wondered apprehensively if she had done something to harm herself.

  But in the morning she rose and took her bath and combed her long wet hair neatly down her back. She put on a sunrise-red bindi and a freshly ironed dhakai sari and set out office clothes for the husband (who, forced to sleep for the first time in his life in the guest room, had submitted to this indignity with surprising meekness). She summoned the cook and told him what to make for lunch and dinner, reminding him to drain the fried brinjal on newspapers before serving it, warning him not to put any chili paste in the children’s chicken curry, nor any dhania leaf either, because it always made the little boy throw up. She played Ludo with the children until they went for their nap, then called the sister to come and choose a suitable design, from the Sheffield catalogue that the husband ordered each year from Britain, for the silver dinner set that was to be their wedding gift to her. In the evening she sat on the veranda with the family and served tea in the fragile Wedgewood cups that had been part of her dowry and wiped the children’s mouths and made conversation in a voice calm as the just-watered jasmine bushes that lined the steps.

  And it was like this every day till the end of the sister’s visit, as though that brief upheaval of household had never been. As though no one had seen that woman with her tawdry clothes, her lewd, painted face. Her contempt-filled eyes that came back to haunt the sister—and surely the husband?—when they lay defenseless under the onslaught of sleep. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief that things were back to normal—it had been so discomfiting to have the wife behave in that crazed manner, even for a day.

  But sometimes in the heat-encrusted afternoons when the wife looked up from a piece of embroidery to stare through the window bars at the blank yellow sky, the sister felt that something was gone, irrevocably, from her face. How much had she guessed of the maid’s story? It was impossible to tell. A patina of hardness that kept the sister from looking in had descended on her. Over the years it would thicken (though no one except the sister seemed to notice) into a burnished mask that gave away nothing. Watching, the sister would shiver, as though she felt the cold hardening of her own arteries. She would grieve silently and, yes, guiltily (no matter how often she told herself that it wasn’t her fault) for that eager embracive grace which had once made her sister a rare and magical being.

  Night has taken over the lawn by the time Deepa Mashi finishes the story. We sit in the dark room, held by the echo of her words, until she reaches over to switch on the lamp. Her cheeks glimmer wetly in the sudden light. “Mashi, you’re crying.”

  Mashi laughs embarrassedly, dismissively. “Oh, you know me, I’m too emotional. No wonder Uncle is always scolding me about it. Any sad story can make me cry. Remember the time we went to see that movie about the kidnapped girl, what was it, Umrao Jaan, at the Globe—I went through three handkerchiefs. …”

  But there’s something more. I feel it in the uneasy silence that has gathered in the corners of the room, among the houseplants and knick-knacks and wall hangings that look suddenly dusty and sad, as though they embodied some unendingly futile human endeavor—a search for beauty, a belief in luck. A hope that happiness will endure. My aunt’s beleaguered world is not the simple one I have always taken it to
be.

  “Mashi,” I ask, “why did you tell me this story?”

  Mashi fidgets, uncomfortable with the bald, western habit I’ve acquired of going at things head on. It isn’t proper, womanly, safe.

  “I don’t know,” she finally says, not looking at me.

  She’s not telling me everything, I sense it. Is this a cautionary parable for brides-to-be? An ancestral tale taken from some outlying branch of our convoluted family tree? Then it strikes me—but without surprise, as though the realization had lain in my subconscious throughout the telling. The events could have happened to my own mother. The child that died of cholera, along with my father, was a boy. He could well have been the baby in the story, and I the little girl.

  I try to push aside the cobwebbed years to get at those pre-epidemic days before my mother moved with me to the small flat (more suited to a widow’s lifestyle and finances) where I grew up, the home where she still lives, the home which appears in all my dreams of childhood—and my nightmares. And now it seems I remember an old house—long marble halls, bright magenta bougainvillea trailing the balcony, the cool whirr of fans in high-ceilinged bedrooms. Once unleashed, the images will not stop: afternoon games of Ludo and checkers, my father’s cologne-scented kiss as I run down the graveled driveway, dodging the mali’s hose, to the black Studebaker that brought him home. Lullabies sung in a country accent haunting as the moonlight that glimmered in the palm trees.

  I tell myself that it’s only my aunt’s storytelling taking root in my overfertile imagination. But I’m sure they happened to me, those sun-filled balcony mornings when I sat at the feet of a woman with a smile sweeter than palm-honey. Her hands were a gentle wind in my hair. When she lifted me onto her lap—come, Khuku—awkwardly, around the growing curve of her belly, I never wanted her to set me down. A woman so different from the mother I know that I want to hit out at someone, to shatter something, to scream until I have no breath left. For a moment I feel the burden of guilt my aunt must bear and wonder if her loving of me, all these years, has been in part an attempt at reparation.

  The others, they existed too—the cranky ayah with her bark-wrinkled face, the deaf aunt whose snores cut through my sleep like a raspy saw, the sweaty cook who made the divinest rice pudding, thickly studded with sugared almonds and fat golden raisins. The slim girl with long hair who played catch with me in the gloom of evening under the lichu trees and read to me of jinns and water witches in a shivery, silvery voice.

  And that last evening—I’m not just giving form to my aunt’s words when I see it again. The forbidden street filled with the bitter scent of drying marigold and jasmine. A woman’s lips twisted in a sneer that is perhaps her defense against heartbreak. A man’s dark face where fear battles rage. My mother curling her fingers around the red stain in her palm as though around a wound that will never heal, while the brightness drains from her face.

  “It’s my mother’s story, isn’t it,” I say to Mashi.

  “Oh dear!” Mashi wrings her hands in agitation. “What an idea! It’s just a story—I should never have brought it up.”

  I know she will not tell me any more. It’s how we survive, we Indian women whose lives are half light and half darkness, stopping short of revelations that would otherwise crisp away our skins. I’m left alone to figure the truth of the story, to puzzle out why it was given to me.

  And then, along the illogical byways of thought, Bijoy’s face flashes against my raw, aching eyelids, handsome and charming and full of laughter, but also—I have never admitted this before—implacable. I wonder if the story (though not intended as such by my aunt) is a warning for me, a preview of my own life which I thought I had fashioned so cleverly, so differently from my mother’s, but which is only a repetition, in a different raga, of her tragic song. Perhaps it is like this for all daughters, doomed to choose for ourselves, over and over, the men who have destroyed our mothers.

  “It’s late,” says Deepa Mashi. “I’d better start dinner. Uncle will be so annoyed if he finds out how I’ve been wasting the afternoon away on silly stories.” But she doesn’t move, and when I reach for her hand, she holds tightly to my fingers. We sit like this, two women caught in the repeating, circular world of shadow and memory, watching where the last fight, silky and fragile, has spilled itself just above the horizon like the palloo of a saffron sari.

  THE

  DISAPPEARANCE

  AT FIRST WHEN THEY HEARD ABOUT THE DISAPPEARANCE, people didn’t believe it.

  Why, we saw her just yesterday at the Ram Ratan Indian Grocery, friends said, picking out radishes for pickling. And wasn’t she at the Mountain View park with her little boy last week, remember, we waved from our car and she waved back, she was in that blue salwaar-kameez, yes, she never did wear American clothes. And the boy waved too, he must be, what, two and a half? Looks just like her with those big black eyes, that dimple. What a shame, they said, it’s getting so that you aren’t safe anywhere in this country nowadays.

  Because that’s what everyone suspected, including the husband. Crime. Otherwise, he said to the investigating policeman (he had called the police that very night), how could a young Indian woman wearing a yellow-flowered kurta and Nike walking shoes just disappear? She’d been out for her evening walk, she took one every day after he got back from the office. Yes, yes, always alone, she said that was her time for herself. (He didn’t quite understand that, but he was happy to watch his little boy, play ball with him, perhaps, until she returned to serve them dinner.)

  Did you folks have a quarrel, asked the policeman, looking up from his notepad with a frown, and the husband looked directly back into his eyes and said, No, of course we didn’t.

  Later he would think about what the policeman had asked, while he sat in front of his computer in his office, or while he lay in the bed which still seemed to smell of her. (But surely that was his imagination—the linen had been washed already.) He had told the truth about them not having a quarrel, hadn’t he? (He prided himself on being an honest man, he often told his son how important it was not to lie, see what happened to Pinocchio’s nose. And even now when the boy asked him where Mama was, he didn’t say she had gone on a trip, as some of his friends’ wives had advised him. I don’t know, he said. And when the boy’s thin face would crumple, want Mama, when she coming back, he held him in his lap awkwardly and tried to stroke his hair, like he had seen his wife do, but he couldn’t bring himself to say what the boy needed to hear, soon-soon. I don’t know, he said over and over.)

  They hadn’t really had a fight. She wasn’t, thank God, the quarrelsome type, like some of his friends’ wives. Quiet. That’s how she was, at least around him, although sometimes when he came home unexpectedly he would hear her singing to her son, her voice slightly off-key but full and confident. Or laughing as she chased him around the family room, Mamas going to get you, get you, both of them shrieking with delight until they saw him. Hush now, she would tell the boy, settle down, and they would walk over sedately to give him his welcome-home kiss.

  He couldn’t complain, though. Wasn’t that what he had specified when his mother started asking, When are you getting married, I’m getting old, I want to see a grandson before I die.

  If you can find me a quiet, pretty girl, he wrote, not brash, like Calcutta girls are nowadays, not with too many western ideas. Someone who would be relieved to have her husband make the major decisions. But she had to be smart, at least a year of college, someone he could introduce to his friends with pride.

  He’d flown to Calcutta to view several suitable girls that his mother had picked out. But now, thinking back, he can only remember her. She had sat, head bowed, jasmine plaited into her hair, silk sari draped modestly over her shoulders, just like all the other prospective brides he’d seen. Nervous, he’d thought, yearning to be chosen. But when she’d glanced up there had been a cool, considering look in her eyes. Almost disinterested, almost as though she were wondering if he would make a suitable spouse
. He had wanted her then, had married her within the week in spite of his mother’s protests (had she caught that same look?) that something about the girl just didn’t feel right.

  He was a good husband. No one could deny it. He let her have her way, indulged her, even. When the kitchen was remodeled, for example, and she wanted pink and gray tiles even though he preferred white. Or when she wanted to go to Yosemite Park instead of Reno, although he knew he would be dreadfully bored among all those bearshit-filled trails and dried-up waterfalls. Once in a while, of course, he had to put his foot down, like when she wanted to get a job or go back to school or buy American clothes. But he always softened his no’s with a remark like, What for, I’m here to take care of you, or, You look so much prettier in your Indian clothes, so much more feminine. He would pull her onto his lap and give her a kiss and a cuddle which usually ended with him taking her to the bedroom.

  That was another area where he’d had to be firm. Sex. She was always saying, Please, not tonight, I don’t feel up to it. He didn’t mind that. She was, after all, a well-bred Indian girl. He didn’t expect her to behave like those American women he sometimes watched on X-rated videos, screaming and biting and doing other things he grew hot just thinking about. But her reluctance went beyond womanly modesty. After dinner for instance she would start on the most elaborate household projects, soaping down the floors, changing the liners in cabinets. The night before she disappeared she’d started cleaning windows, taken out the Windex and the rags as soon as she’d put the boy to bed, even though he said, Let’s go. Surely he couldn’t be blamed for raising his voice at those times (though never so much as to wake his son), or for grabbing her by the elbow and pulling her to the bed, like he did that last night. He was always careful not to hurt her, he prided himself on that. Not even a little slap, not like some of the men he’d known growing up, or even some of his friends now. And he always told himself he’d stop if she really begged him, if she cried. After some time, though, she would quit struggling and let him do what he wanted. But that was nothing new. That could have nothing to do with the disappearance.