Arranged Marriage

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  “Your time is up, madam,” interrupts the operator’s voice with its heavy Indian accent.

  “Anju,” Runu calls desperately, “what am I going to do?”

  My brain is frozen, and my tongue. “Charge the call to this number,” I finally manage to tell the operator. “That’ll be a collect call then, double charge.”

  “OK.”

  I hear the intake of Sunil’s breath on the extension. I stiffen, sure he’ll ask me to call Runu back. But he doesn’t.

  “Do you have anything with you, any money?” I ask Runu. I’m afraid to hear her reply. As in most traditional households, her mother-in-law handles the finances. When Runu needs something, she has to ask her for it.

  But Runu surprises me.

  “I have three hundred rupees—I took it out of Ramesh’s desk drawer. And all my jewelry that was in the house. Just in case.”

  “Just in case what?” I want her to say it. I need to hear her say it.

  “Just in case I decided not to go back.” Runu’s voice is stronger now. I think she needed to hear herself say it too.

  “Well then, why don’t you take the next train to Calcutta. Stay with your mother until you figure things out—maybe she can put some pressure on your in-laws….”

  “It’s not so simple.” And now Runu sounds scared again. “I called Mother just before I called you. She says it’s not right that I should leave my husband’s home. My place is with them, for better or worse. She’s afraid they’ll never take me back if I move out, and then what would happen to me? People will think they threw me out because I did something bad. They’ll think my baby’s a bastard….” Her voice breaks on the last word.

  The walls of my bedroom seem to undulate, then close in on me. Pratima-auntie is one of the gentlest and most affectionate women I know. I’ve always thought of her as my second mother. “Did you tell her they’re determined to make you go through with the abortion?”

  “I did. She thinks it’s the lesser of the two evils. Anju, what shall I do?”

  I take a deep breath. As I talk, I press my palm tight against my belly, drawing warmth from my baby. Drawing strength.

  After I hang up, I sit hunched over on the edge of the bed. I feel old and drained and sick to my stomach. I hope by God I’ve given Runu the right advice.

  “What are you going to do now?” says Sunil from the doorway. I can see displeasure in the tight press of his lips.

  “I’m going to the bathroom to throw up,” I tell him. “And then I’m going to make”—I hold his eyes, daring him to protest—“another call to India.”

  Later in bed Sunil says, “I don’t think you should have told Runu to go to your mother’s house.”

  I bolt upright, pushing off the covers. “Why not? What was the poor girl supposed to do? Let her in-laws force her into an abortion she didn’t want? Besides, my mother didn’t mind. Why do you have such a problem with it?” My tone is deliberately aggressive. I want—I need—to attack someone.

  Sunil refuses to be baited. “What could your mother say?” His voice is infuriatingly reasonable. “You told her that Runu was on her way. Besides, you were already so worked up, she probably didn’t want to upset you further. …”

  “Worked up. Worked up! You’d be worked up too if people were trying to kill—no, murder—your baby niece.”

  Sunil ignores the interruption. “But have you thought of what’s going to happen to Runu now? How’s she going to live? Your aunt barely has enough money to pay her own expenses.”

  “Runu can get a job.”

  “Doing what? She has no training, no experience.”

  “She could …” I think furiously. “She could supply the local boutiques with needlework. Or salwaar-kameez outfits. She’s real good at sewing. …”

  Sunil gives me an ironic look. “You really believe it’s that easy, don’t you?”

  “Not easy, perhaps, but certainly possible.”

  “Even if that’s true, what about the social stigma? Just like her mother said, there’ll be a lot of gossip.”

  “There’s always gossip. You have to ignore it.”

  “That’s easy for you to say from here. Runu’s the one who’ll have to face it every day. Even if money isn’t a problem, what kind of life will it be for her? She certainly won’t have the chance to remarry. She’ll be alone with her daughter the rest of her life, a social pariah, someone the neighbors point a finger at every time she walks down the street.”

  I open my mouth to protest hotly, then shut it. I’m remembering the pictures we used to draw when we were little, Runu and I, about what we wanted to be when we grew up. Mine would change from week to week—a jungle explorer, a scientist, a parachute jumper—but hers were always the same. They showed a stick-figure woman in a traditional red bordered sari with a big bunch of keys tied to the palloo. She wore a red marriage bindi and a big smile and stood next to a mustachioed man dressed in a suit and carrying a briefcase. Several stick-figure children (their sex indicated by boxy short pants or triangular skirts) would be gathered around them, arms linked, dancing. Had I taken all of that away from her by my misplaced American notions of feminism and justice? For a moment a terrible doubt rises in me like nausea, threatening to spill out.

  “Maybe her mother wasn’t so wrong after all,” Sunil says. “Maybe the abortion is the lesser of the two evils.”

  I stare at my husband. At the dark, heavy shapes of the words he has released into the air between us. It strikes me I know far less about this man than I had naively, romantically, believed.

  “Why don’t you say Runu’s mother-in-law’s right too. And Ramesh,” I finally whisper. “Why don’t you say you agree with him? Maybe you’d have wanted me to have an abortion if my baby hadn’t turned out to be a boy.”

  “Anju!” Sunil’s voice quivers with indignation.

  I avoid his eyes and snatch up my pillows. “I’m going to sleep on the family-room couch,” I say. What I’ve said is probably irrational, even unforgivable, but I’m in it too deep now to back away. I slam the door behind me for good measure.

  I throw my pillows onto the lumpy couch and wipe my damp, shaking palms on my nightdress. I open the refrigerator and eye a large frozen pepperoni pizza. I’m tempted to pop it into the microwave oven and eat the whole thing, every last soggy forkful. I imagine newspaper headlines which read, Pregnant woman, driven to despair by cruel husband, ends up in hospital due to pizza overdose. That would serve Sunil right.

  Instead I settle for a glass of hot milk and honey, and after I’ve drunk it, I try to make, myself comfortable on the couch. But questions riddle me. It feels like when I have pins-and-needles in my legs, except now it’s all over my body. Does Sunil love me, or only the mother-to-be of his son? Would he have cared for me as much if we had been in India and the baby had turned out to be a girl? What if I hadn’t been able to have a baby at all? Would he be asking his parents to look for another wife for him? Pregnant-woman fancies, perhaps, but I can’t stop them from coming. And Runu, who must be almost halfway to Calcutta by now. How is she feeling as she watches, from her train window, the thatched porches of village huts where women cook their husbands’ lunches over wood fires while their children play around them? Will she look back on this day and curse me?

  I close my aching eyes. Please, I pray, please just let me sleep

  Then the memory comes to me, so intense that I can feel once again the cold slimy jelly rubbed onto my skin, the monitor sliding back and forth over the mound of my belly as the doctor prepares for the ultrasound that will let me see the baby for the first time. At first he is a vague dark shape on the screen. Then as the image is enlarged I see the delicate curl of his perfect fishbone spine, the small bump of his sex. He waves his arms and legs in a graceful underwater dance, though as yet I don’t feel any of it. The green radium blip on the screen, not unlike the stars Runu and I used to watch on those long ago summer nights, is the beat of his fierce heart.

  That ult
rasound had changed everything, made my baby, my Anand, real in a way that nothing else had.

  I know it must have been the same for Runu.

  I feel better about my decision. I still can’t say, for sure, that I gave Runu the right advice. Even with decisions you make for yourself, it takes years to know. But my body begins to relax. Soften. I take a deep breath and put my hand over my belly, and feel, for the first time, a small but definite movement.

  Maybe Runu can come to the U.S. with her daughter, I think. Maybe she can five close by in a little apartment and sew clothes for all the Indian ladies. She can sell chutneys and sweets and samosas—maybe even open her own restaurant. I can see our children growing up together, as close as their mothers were, Anand and—I give my niece a name—Dayita, beloved, for so she will be to us.

  Anand and Dayita, I whisper aloud. Anand and Dayita. It sounds beautiful, complete, like a line from a ghazal.

  Tomorrow I’ll ask Sunil about sponsoring Runu, maybe getting her a student visa. I know he’ll fight it at first, give me a hundred reasons why we can’t do it. Why we shouldn’t. But I’ll fight back. Already I’m learning how. I’ll use what I have to—my pregnancy, even. It’s worth it—for Runu and, yes, myself. I’ll get my way.

  I know I will, I say to myself, and smiling, I drift into sleep.

  AFFAIR

  I WAS IN THE KITCHEN CHOPPING VEGETABLES FOR DINNER when I found out about it. From Ashok. During a commercial break on TV in the middle of the football game he was watching.

  “You know, of course,” he said, raising himself elegantly up on one elbow from his favorite position on the couch so he could watch my face, “that Meena is having an affair?”

  Just like that.

  The knife slipped and nicked my finger. I watched the blood appear as though from nowhere, dyeing the meticulously sliced carrots a deeper orange. I felt like throwing something at Ashok, the bowl of green lauki squash I’d picked up at the Indian grocery, maybe. Or maybe even the cutting board, arcing through the air and smacking that smile off his face.

  But I didn’t. I merely held up the bleeding finger and said, in the mild, reasonable tone I’d perfected over eight years of marriage, “Now look what you made me do. I really wish you wouldn’t spring things on me like this.”

  “Poor Abha.” The look of sympathy on Ashok’s face was so real that even I, who knew better, was almost fooled. Ashok’s good at that. “Want me to kiss your finger and make it better?”

  “No, thank you,” I snapped, reaching in the drawer for a Band-Aid.

  “How was I to know she hadn’t told you? She is your best friend, after all,” said Ashok. And then, “You’re mad, aren’t you, that she told me instead of you?” Triumph gleamed in his eyes.

  He was right, and he knew it. But I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of acknowledgment, so I remained silent.

  Until today I’d thought I knew all about Meena’s life, just as she knew about mine. We talked to each other every day—on the phone if we couldn’t get together in person. She’d called me just an hour earlier, before our husbands returned from work, so we could “really talk, without the guys interrupting us.” She’d told me about the office, how the new ad campaign she’d thought up had already increased their sales. And about the cutest little jacket she’d picked up at Nordstrom’s, with a real fox-fur collar. She hadn’t said a thing about an affair.

  Feeling betrayed, I busied myself with chopping onions so I’d have a valid reason for tears.

  “I bet you’re dying to know who he is.” Ashok’s voice sparkled with malicious mischief. “I’ll tell you if you ask me very nicely.”

  He would have, too. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It would have meant defeat.

  Angrily I dumped a couple of extra teaspoons of red pepper powder into the chicken curry. Hot food gives Ashok the most terrible heartburn. Usually I wouldn’t have stooped to such an obvious revenge, but right now I was too agitated to be subtle.

  Then a thought struck me. I went over and stood in front of Ashok.

  “Is this a joke? Is this some kind of a sick practical joke?”

  “Would I do such a thing?” Ashok was all wounded innocence. “Especially when I know how fond you are of Meena?”

  “I remember the time you pretended you got laid off from work. …”

  Ashok flashed me a charming smile that was also a challenge. “Why don’t you ask Meena yourself at Kuldeep’s party tomorrow?” He pressed the volume-increase button on the remote control.

  “If this is a joke, you’re going to be really sorry,” I shouted over the blare of the TV.

  Ashok blew me a lazy kiss. He loves it when he manages to get under my skin. He recrossed his legs in one liquid motion, aimed the remote, and flipped through shows (another habit of his that drives me crazy) until he found MTV, a channel I particularly dislike.

  I retreated to the kitchen with its shiny rows of canisters, its racks of spices all carefully labeled, its gleaming tiles and faucets that usually made me feel sane and in control. But I couldn’t escape the TV, where a very young, very blond woman in a shimmery skintight outfit was sultrily singing about how you make me feel each night. I averted my eyes from the slow undulation of her hips, the pointy-red tip of her tongue moistening her lips. Her painted fingernails moving suggestively over her breasts. I knew Ashok was watching me, a mocking curl to his lips that seemed to say, Still suffering from your prudish Indian upbringing, Abha? But I couldn’t help it. Sex for me was a matter between married people, carried out in the silent privacy of their bedroom and resulting, hopefully, in babies. I preferred not to think of its other aspects, and I resented American TV for invading my home with them.

  I stared down at the translucent curls of the onions waiting on the cutting board. They formed an intricate pattern against the dark wood, glistening like shavings of mother-of-pearl. If I could read them, as people did tea leaves, what would it tell me about Meena? About Ashok and myself and our constant sparring? It was a depressing thought. I threw another spoon of red pepper powder into the chicken for good measure and, leaving the rest of the dinner uncooked, locked myself in the spare bedroom upstairs.

  I threw myself down on the neatly made guest bed, across the scratchy Jodhpuri bedspread embroidered with good-luck lotuses which had been part of my trousseau, and cried for a while. But crying has always seemed to me to be a waste of time. All it does is make my face puff up. So I stopped and wiped my face on the edge of my sari and checked my reflection in the mirror. I looked every bit as terrible as I’d expected—swollen eyes, red nose, sallow skin. There were red crisscross marks on my forehead where I’d pressed it against the bedspread.

  Even under the best of circumstances I am no beauty. If my horoscope hadn’t matched Ashok’s so perfectly that everyone declared our marriage must have been ordained by the gods, I doubt that his family would have chosen me. I don’t have Meena’s fair skin, so dramatic with her curly black hair and long lashes. My nose is broad and honest but by no means elegant, while hers, straight and chisel-sharp, looks as though it belonged on an apsara from classical Indian sculpture. I constantly battle the inches that accumulate almost by magic around my hips (I put on a pound every time I look at dessert), while Meena glides through life slim and svelte, eating whatever she wants and wearing designer bikinis. “You could look really pretty, Abha,” she laments periodically, “but you don’t even try.” She’s shown me how to pull in my stomach and push back my shoulders when I walk, but I invariably forget. And when I’m forced by necessity to venture into the mall, I always pick up clothing with bright flowery patterns instead of the dark solids and narrow stripes she’s advised me to wear.

  “It’s important for you to dress right because you’re in marketing and have to impress clients,” I told her once. “Me, I just do freelance work from home, writing recipes for the Indian papers. Why do I need to look good?”

  “Really, Abha!” Meena had shaken her head like the
re was no hope for me. “All women need to look good. Don’t you want Ashok’s heartbeat to speed up when he looks at you?”

  The thought of it made me laugh out loud. Really, sometimes Meena’s ideas were so adolescent I remembered my mother, who’d spent most of her life in the simple red-bordered cotton saris most Bengali mothers wore, dabbing at her plump face with its palloo as she hurried from kitchen to nursery to dining room. I doubted that she’d ever made my father’s heartbeat speed up (though of course he loved her)—at least not in the last thirty years that I’d known them.

  “You’re starting to sound like an American, Meena! Indian marriages aren’t based on such superficial things.”

  “That’s what you think! Watch out—by the time you realize I’m right, it might be too late.” Meena’s tone had been joking. Still, it had reminded me how, a few evenings earlier, Ashok had looked up from a magazine he’d been reading and said, quite out of the blue, “Abha, I wish you’d do something to your hair, go get a perm maybe.”

  Right now, though, I had more serious problems to worry about than my looks.

  I do my best thinking when I write things down, so I reached under the bed. Safe behind the suitcases we haven’t pulled out in years I hide a notepad and pen for occasions like this. On the lined yellow sheet I wrote:

  I. Why is Meena having an affair (if she is having one)?

  I left some space below that, then added:

  II. How wrong is what she is doing (if she is doing it)?

  I left some more space (although I already knew the answer to this one: very very wrong) and went on to the third question.

  III. Should I confront her about it?

  There was another question. Needle-sharp, it pricked at my eyelids when I closed them. But I wasn’t ready to write it down.

  Downstairs the doorbell rang. Who could it be so late at night? I parted the bedroom blinds and peered out. There was a Domino’s Pizza van outside, its blue-and-red lighted sign twinkling festively. Damn! Ashok had outsmarted me again.