I shiver involuntarily. “Nothing—it was nothing,” I say to Anju. “Listen, we’ve run out of milk. How about walking down to the grocery with me?”
“Don’t try to prevaricate. You’re so bad at it, it’s pathetic! I’m going to keep at you till you tell me, so you might as well do it now.”
All through our childhood Anju’s been this way. If a puzzle caught her eye, she couldn’t rest until she solved it. If a situation intrigued her, she’d ask questions until the mothers, exasperated, sent her to her room. She had to get to the bottom of every mystery she came across. I’d thought marriage would have taught her more caution.
I sigh. “It was the Simpson trial. Something about the dead wife’s face. Do you remember how Mangala died?”
“She got run over. It was terribly sad. She used to be so pretty, so full of life—”
“There was more to it than that. The Rai Bahadur’s son fell in love with her and wanted to marry her. His father tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen. Nor would Mangala. The old man offered her a lot of money if she left, but she refused. That was when the accident occurred.”
Anju frowns. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” I say, though suddenly I’m not. Pishi might have pretended to forget Mangala’s story, but Anju’s perplexed face is guileless. “I overheard the neighborhood aunties talking about it a couple of times when they came over for tea. I’m positive I told you about it.”
Anju shakes her head slowly.
“Anju! How can you forget something like that?” My voice is wobbly, disoriented. I feel as if I’m suspended in space. No, not in space. Inside a giant, suffocating ball of cotton wool. There was a book we studied in class twelve, just before Mother took me out of school. It was about a future society where they’d remove all accounts of the past that they didn’t want people to know about from books, movies, songs, everything. They’d put what they wanted in its place, and after a while everyone believed that that was what actually happened. It was terrible because it was so deliberately done.
But isn’t it worse when such an erasure happens unconsciously?
“Anju, try to remember! People whispered that it was a setup—the old man had sent Mangala to the corner paan shop to get some betel leaves. But there never was a trial. The old man was too powerful—he bribed all the right folks.”
“Sudha,” Anju says doubtfully, “are you sure you’re not getting this mixed up with a movie you saw, or maybe a story from one of those mystery magazines Aunt N. used to read all the time?”
If no one recalls what you remember, is what happened real anymore?
“I’m certain!” I’m angry now, and scared. How far we’ve moved from each other, my cousin and I. Even our memories are marooned on separate islands. “And then, just a few months later, the old man arranged a marriage for his son with some rich factory owner’s daughter. It was very grand—fireworks, a band, everything. The whole street attended the wedding feast—especially the whispering neighbors.”
“Now that part I’m ready to believe!”
“It was as though poor Mangala had never existed,” I say. “I can’t help wondering whether, if all this had happened here, she would have found some justice.”
“I don’t know,” says Anju. “You’re too romantic about what goes on in America. There are a lot of silenced women here. The no-money, no-rights rule works here, too. And bribery. It’s just not as blatant. The media’s making all this fuss about Nicole’s case only because O. J. was a celebrity, and it’s the kind of scandal people love to watch. It’s got very little to do with love of justice.”
Sometimes when I lie sleepless, trying to comprehend the shape of my life, I imagine how the dead might spend their nights. Would they be hovering over the beds of those they had loved or hated, emanating blessings or curses? Would they haunt their dreams? I think I feel something silvery, nervelike, linking me to those who are gone, even though I knew them so slightly. Singhji, Mangala, Nicole, Prem. A breath on my forehead, sighed-out syllables I can’t quite catch. A movement, shimmery with impatience, glimpsed out of the corner of an eye. A gesture which might mean, Listen harder!
“What are you thinking now?” asked Anju.
I say nothing. She’d just call me fanciful. In any case, how could I bear to tell her that the reason I long to connect with the dead is because she’s gone from me.
I wait until after I’ve served dinner. Then I tell them about Lalit’s call. I give Sunil a hard look as I speak. He looks back at me, all innocence, then goes back to cutting his chicken into neat, unperturbed cubes.
“I knew it!” Anju clasps her hands together theatrically. “Take her to one party, and already she has suitors knocking at the door!”
“Stop it! He just wants to show me around.”
“Yeah, sure!”
“I don’t think she should go,” Sunil tells Anju.
Speak to me directly, you coward!
“After all, we hardly know him.”
I’m not exactly asking for your permission, you know. I didn’t leave a marriage and travel halfway across the world so you could set yourself up as my guardian. Not that it’s my welfare you’re concerned with, you hypocrite.
“In that case we needn’t worry!” Anju says. “Didn’t we hear the other night, on one of those talk shows you seem to have grown addicted to, that women are attacked by strangers far less often than by people close to them?”
“Is that supposed to be a joke?” Sunil asks. “If it is, I must say you’re developing a strange sense of humor.”
“It’s better than not having any humor at all, like certain people I could name.”
“Excuse me,” I say, before the situation deteriorates further. “I’ve already decided to go with Lalit. I just wanted to let you know.”
Silence bristles around my announcement. Then Sunil picks Dayita up. “And what about her?” The two of them give me identical, accusing stares.
“I … well, I could …”
Anju comes to my rescue. “We’ll keep Dayu!”
“I might have to go in to work,” Sunil says frostily.
Anju gives him an exasperated, wifely look.
“I’ll keep her, then,” she says. “Don’t give it another thought! You go and have a great day with your amor.” She gives Sunil a wicked glance. “Oops, did I say amor? You guys will have to forgive me, this is only my first quarter of Spanish. I meant amigo, of course!”
“Great!” Lalit says when I phone him. “I’ll pick you up at ten A.M. and take you up to the City. We’ll have the wildest, wickedest time. Maybe I’ll never bring you back.”
Though I know he can’t hear, I shoot a quick glance at Sunil. From behind the newspaper, that refuge of so many males, he’s whispering something to Anju.
“Why are you being so obsessively patriarchal?” Anju replies. “She’s a grown woman—quite able to take care of herself.”
I find a pen and walk to the calendar. At last I have something to write on it! But against my will my eyes are pulled to Sunil. All I can see of him are his hands, gripping the paper. His nails are neat, careful, boyish. Why do they make me sad? When they first met, Anju was crazy about him. She would copy out entire love poems from her English textbook for him. She’d talk about him to me for hours.
No, I won’t write anything. Each time Sunil passed by and saw Lalit’s name, it would be like salt rubbed into a wound.
I put the pen away and start on the dishes. And so I don’t see, until it’s too late, that 10:00 A.M. Saturday sits squarely in the middle of the rahukal hours.
“For heaven’s sake! Give her your cell phone if you’re so worried,” I hear Anju snap as she gathers up her books and moves to the bedroom. “Then she can call if there’s a problem, and you can go get her.”
Is this the way passion must end?
Only later will I be struck by my cousin’s choice of pronouns. You, not we.
Monday … Tuesday … Wednesday … Thu
rsday. I cook and do laundry, take Dayita to the park. Out of old habit, I glance around for Sara, but am not unhappy when I don’t find her. For the moment, I’ve given up on desperation. I play baby tag, I watch Oprah and Mr. Rogers, I learn American gestures. Impatience burns me like a heat flash, in between I’m calm as ice. I scrub the bathroom, I turn the radio up loud to dance. I eat healthy, I bathe long, I scrub my face with turmeric and besan and put fuchsia polish on my toenails. I dream terrible, guilty dreams. After dinner, Sunil plays finger games with Dayita. I wash the dishes, Anju dries. Or, rather, she flourishes the kitchen towel and recites lines from the “Clerk’s Tale,” which they’re studying in one of her classes. The old words, half-mysterious, half-familiar, sound like bells from some foreign land.
“Talk about male fantasies!” she adds. “You won’t believe this woman Griselda. No, actually, you will—she’s a photocopy of so many of our Indian heroines. Sita, Savitri, Damayanti. It’s like they all trained at the same academy, got the same M.R.S. degree.”
“M.R.S.?”
“You know, short for martyrs.”
I smile, but only a little part of me is listening. The rest is deep down and dancing. The strobe lights pulse. Jeweled women dart around me like hummingbirds. That’s the way, uh huh, uh huh, I like it, uh huh, uh huh. Wild me, wicked me. The me that’s given up on the M.R.S. degree. I swim through an ocean of fun, all the fun that my past denied me.
About my future I will not think.
Folly and frivolity, my mother would have said. My mother-in-law would have called it sin. Pishi would have warned me that when we desire something so much, the gods snatch it away. Even Gouri Ma would have advised caution. I turn my back on them all and ask Anju, “What’s the difference between a soldier and a lady?”
She looks at me blankly. “Huh?”
My laughter carries me all the way to Saturday morning. A laughter in which anxiety is suspended like sediment in a rushing river.
But first there’s Friday. On Friday the phone rings, again right after Anju and Sunil leave. I’m smiling as I pick it up. Ah so, the good doctor is a creature of habit.
“Soo-dah, please,” says an American-female voice.
My heart struggles like a caught animal. “That’s me.”
“I’m Lupe. Sara gave me your number—”
“Where is Sara? I haven’t seen her for ages. She said she’d call me, but she never did.” A thought that I hadn’t considered earlier strikes me. “Is she in trouble?”
Lupe pauses. Then she says, “You still looking for a job?”
“Yes!”
“Hasn’t been easy finding a job for you. It’s because of the baby. No one wants a nanny with a baby. But, finally, I got something. It isn’t that good a situation, though, I’ll tell you up front.”
“Oh,” I say.
“This woman, she needs a caretaker for her father-in-law for when she goes to work. He’s bedridden and has a bit of a temper. She didn’t tell me that part, but I have ways. A lot of times he gets confused, loses control of his bladder, stuff like that. You’ve got to clean him, make him eat, give him his medicine. That kind of thing. You want it?”
My heart sinks. I’d hoped for an easygoing, sunny child to baby-sit, like Sara’s Joshua. A companion to Dayita. They’d play together and take naps at the same time. They’d never fight.
“Let me think about it,” I say, for politeness’s sake. But I already know. As a child, I’d visited too many families where old relatives lived. Sometimes we children would peek into their rooms, which were always the small ones at the back of the house. I clearly remember the distinct, sour odor of the wasted bodies, the crazed eyes that grabbed yours and wouldn’t let go, the thin, silvery drool, like snail tracks, on their chins.
I’m not that desperate.
Still, I take down Lupe’s number. I’ll call her each week. Surely something better will turn up.
“They’re Indian, by the way. At least he is.” Another strike against them. Indians are the worst employers, Sara had said. Treat you like shit, and then gossip among their friends about you.
“That’s why she agreed to try you,” Lupe says. “Baby and all. She thinks it’ll help if you talk to him in his language.”
“We have a lot of languages in India,” I say. “I might not speak his.”
It’s a good thing I’ve already made up my mind not to take this job.
“Is Sara okay?” I ask one last time. “Do you have her number?”
“She’ll call you when she can,” says Lupe, who has obviously mastered the art of evading questions.
Fourteen
Assigment
Write a brief (approximately five hundred words) character sketch of a person you know closely. Choose a person you normally have difficulty understanding. The paper should give us a distinct sense of a personality and the motivations/obsessions that drive him/her. Clarify your relationship to this person. This assignment is to help you comprehend this character more fully and to prepare you for your next paper for the course, a full-length memoir piece about this person.
My Name is Sunil
by
Anju Majumdar
for
English 3162
Memoir
Prof. W. Lindley
The first time I dreamed of the eagle was when I was nine. My father had just allowed me to have a pet, which I had been wanting for years. It was a gray rabbit. I named it Alexander, because we had been studying Greek history in school. My father thought it was a stupid name for a rabbit, but he didn’t say too much because I had been chosen for the school football team, the youngest player in my division, and he was pleased.
We were playing against the Bakul Bagan Boys School that evening. It was a rainy day, the field was so muddy we couldn’t even see the grass. I kept slipping, missing the ball. Once I fell hard and felt the pain slice through my knee. But I didn’t stop because Father was out there watching, he’d come home early from work just for me. The ball was coming right at me, chased by a group of boys who all looked very large and fierce. One of them had a straggly mustache, like a hairy caterpillar that had shed most of its hair. As I was thinking this, he slammed into me. I fell with my leg twisted under me and couldn’t get up until the referee blew the whistle and helped me off the field. Our team lost, bad. I was afraid to see the expression on my father’s face. When I finally dared to look for him among the spectators, I couldn’t find him. It took me a while to get home—the coach had to bandage up my knee, which was swollen, and when I was let off at the school bus stop, there was no one waiting for me. I didn’t have enough money to hire a rickshaw, so I limped home. When I got there, Alexander was gone. No one ever told me what happened to him.
That night I dreamed of the eagle. I was in a field. It came out of the sky like a black feathered meteor. I was terrified, but then it swooped down and put me on its back. We flew up until the earth was as small as a marble, and I knew I’d never have to go back to it. I put my arms around the eagle’s neck and felt the heat from her body. Her feathers were like melted bronze. The wind roared in my ears and I thought, This must be what love feels like.
For the next few years, each time something terrible happened, I dreamed of the eagle, and she kept me going. Then I went away and things got better. I did well in college, I got a job in America. I got married to a woman who was smart and funny, if not as beautiful as I’d wanted. I even liked her temper. It made life interesting. There were still some unhappy things in my life, but I didn’t have to think about them. I was working hard at making a good life, I was working harder at becoming a good person, and this was important because we were about to have a baby.
But the baby died. The baby died and the field was oozy brown like chocolate sauce, no, like shit, and it was sucking me in, I breathed it, it covered my eyeballs, it seeped in through my pores. It was worse than dying. I groped to find my wife, but she was lost in her own shit field, and I didn’t have the strength to car
e. With my last breath, I called for the eagle.
No eagle appeared, not then.
Later (there’s always a later, isn’t there, no matter how bad things get), when I came back to the tatters of myself, I found I was no longer the same. I no longer believed in happiness, and thus didn’t believe in the need for goodness either. Still, I tried. I tried to shore up my wife; I tried to salvage my waterlogged career. I tried to cut myself loose from anger and make do with what life had seen fit to leave me. Some days, waking, I had to ask myself what my name was. But this much I knew: I wasn’t ever going to want anything as desperately as I’d wanted my baby.
Then She came back into my life. Flew all the way from India with her melted bronze eyes. A dislocated gear slammed back into place in my head, and I, Sunil, kicked off morality and obligation like a pair of worn-out shoes.
Ms. Majumdar:
This is well written and powerful in its impact, but a bit of a surprise. It’s more of a dramatic monologue (which we do not cover in this class) than a character sketch, which is what I’d asked for.
The character of Sunil is a strong one, though somewhat monodimensional I am not sure this assignment has helped you understand him further. Nor am I certain of your relationship to him. The narrative intelligence in the essay is not sufficiently male (too emotional). Can you work on this?
Your comparisons are quite good (the hairy caterpillar, for example), but you tend to mix your metaphors unnecessarily (see last paragraph) and sometimes use too many, one after another, which makes all of them less effective (see last paragraph, again). Why is the eagle sometimes an “it” and sometimes a “she”? And sometimes a “She”??
What, by the way, does the last paragraph mean? It’s very ambiguous.
I liked the beginning of the essay, but as the paper went along it became somewhat overwrought and abstract. I’ve noticed this shortcoming in other papers of yours as well.
I’m not sure how you will work this into a full-length memoir piece. Maybe you should just start over with a subject you feel less emotional about.
The Vine of Desire: A Novel Page 14