“Well, how would you feel? Picture this. You’re married to the god of sensual love. You’re accustomed to getting the best, right? And one day he’s all, sorry, honey, but I’m Kama the Bodiless now, get used to the spiritual version? My ass. I’d be outa there in a New York minute.”
“So she left him?”
“So he says.”
“Why doesn’t the sutra record any of this?” But I knew. “Ah. History is rewritten by the victors. Shiva’s side of the story was the one that would come down to us.”
“That’s right. There are still temples all over India carved with him and his lady and their devotees doing sex positions out of the Kama Sutra. But the bastards Shiva-sized us.”
“Typical male,” I murmured, repeating something Auntie Lakshmi had often said.
Lolly seemed to brood. “Anyway he’s told his story to a lot of women, same as me. He said he was done with hiding from Shiva. He said he wanted to reestablish his worship, and maybe this would attract his wife, make her get in touch with him. That’s why he only dates each woman once. If he kisses her and he doesn’t get the right signs from her aura or something, he knows it’s not his wife and he has to keep looking. Isn’t that the most romantic thing you ever heard?”
It sounded to me as if Kamadeva had perfected his womanizing technique. “So did you tell him you were reestablishing his cult?”
“I haven’t had the chance. I’ve been trolling Facebook, but he doesn’t seem to have an account. I found a lot of other girls he’s dated, though.”
“And he has never repeated with any of you?”
“Not so far.”
Remembering his horrified face and how he ran from the coffee shop that day, I guessed that Kama was allergic to being importuned for repeat dates. Between the wine and the heat in my belly, I found it easier now to ask my most pressing question.
“When you’re kissing someone,” I said, “do you find anything special happening?”
“What do you mean, special?”
“I don’t know. A strange sensation inside.”
“You mean, like getting all lubed up and horny?”
I blushed. “I was thinking of that heat. The kundalini effects you spoke of.”
“With most guys? I’m lucky not to choke on their tongue. No technique at all,” Lolly said frankly. She was the most uninhibited girl. “How old are you, anyway?”
“I’m thirty-four,” I said with as much dignity as I could muster while dabbling my feet in a public waterfall.
“Boy.”
“And you are right. I was very strictly brought up.” Until I was nine. After that, I brought myself up strictly, while Auntie Lakshmi tried to corrupt me. I didn’t tell Lolly that part. “I was betrothed when I was born, so it is vital to my family that I stay chaste.”
“You’re kidding me!” Lolly seemed scandalized.
“Sadly, no. You would think professional caste people like my parents were above that. But the priests did a divination when I was born and said I had to get engaged as soon as possible. My mother is very religious,” I added sourly.
“Did they give a reason?”
“Not to me.”
“Who is this guy they engaged you to?”
“He’s some important minister with the government in Malankhara—that’s a remote state in the south of India. I never even met him. They showed me his photograph when I was a child.”
Lolly said indignantly, “That’s fucking medieval.”
“I don’t argue with you there.” The more we talked about it, the angrier I got, all over again. “I wonder what happened to that photograph. My mother sent it to me while I was in law school. Hoping, no doubt, to keep me on the straight and narrow path in that haunt of vice.” For the first time all day, I smiled. “Never mind. I stopped taking that betrothal seriously when I was seventeen.”
Unlike my mother. She was still throwing that in my face. Including the fake heart attack. Just as well that I hadn’t told her what I had been up to with Kamadeva.
With the chilling of my blood from the feet up, I began to feel calmer.
It was apparent to me that Kamadeva—my Kamadeva, not the lusty love god of Lolly’s imagining—was a very accomplished philanderer.
I wondered whether his sexual technique was as accomplished as his badinage. In our one encounter in Judge Green’s restroom, I had done all the kissing. He had held still. Had he been afraid I would bite him, or tear him to pieces, as I myself had feared? Hardly. His calm throughout was rather more reassuring, like the bedside manner of a veterinarian called in to wait upon a horse in labor.
I had felt like a tigress. A tigress on fire.
Maybe Lolly was right. Could it be kundalini?
During my first nine years in Delhi, I never heard of kundalini. But the valley girls in my California school threw “kundalini” around the same way they said “metabolism.” Everything was the fault of your kundalini. It was too strong. It was too slow. One had too much or too little control of it. Girls who wore makeup before they were twelve whispered about kundalini behind their hands.
But a nice girl, such as my parents raised me to be, would know nothing of such things.
Once upon a time, maybe, Indian girls had cavorted naked in the temples of Kamadeva, but no more. Nowadays all Hindu women were cut down to—what did Lolly call it?—“Shiva-size.”
My feminist blood boiled at the thought. Auntie Lakshmi had always called me a late bloomer. Maybe I was finally blooming! Should I trust the opinions of a starstruck Indiophile like Lolly, steeped in new age and radical feminism, or a world-class womanizer like Kama, marinating in testosterone and his own self-importance?
Maybe it was my kundalini. The growling power of that tigress was not sunk too deeply in cold water for me to feel her.
Moreover, I was thinking that I owed myself a full awakening.
No woman can call herself liberated who keeps herself on a chain in this, her most personal area of power.
My self-delusion advanced a step further.
I reasoned that Kamadeva would be the perfect man to help me. He was not intimidated by any woman’s sexuality. According to Lolly and all her fellow Kamadevites, he would be expert in bed.
And when I was finished with him, he would move on.
Perfect.
Nevertheless, I decided it would be best if Kama did not learn about Lolly and her worshipful ladies. His head was big enough already.
Chapter Nine
I broke down and Skyped home that night, well after the dinner hour in Delhi. I got my father, who looked tight and prissy, as he always does when he’s worried.
“Is Mummy at home?” I said, after we had talked about his business for a while.
“She is at the temple. She is very concerned about you,” he admitted.
I knew what that meant. My mother was gathering weapons for her next attack.
I pressed my lips together. “I will not marry a man I have never set eyes on.”
Father said nothing to this. His prissy look got worse. “You were always so obedient and dutiful at home.”
I kept my temper. “Well, when I come home, if I ever meet this wonderful fiancé you have found for me, and if I like him, I will consider being obedient and dutiful.”
“Your Mummy…” he began.
“What?” I said dangerously.
He sighed. He turned his head quickly away and back to me, and his image jumped on the screen. “This was her idea, not mine, you understand.”
No wonder he has trouble in business. No one ever beats down a competitor or wins an argument by blaming the decision-making on someone else.
“Rathi,” he said finally, “we always assumed you would stay in the United States.”
“Wh-what?” I felt my insides turn suddenly to water. “Not come home? But what about my—this betrothed? He works in Malankhara. He can’t marry somebody who’s always in America.” I heard my voice rise to a whine.
Papaji�
��s face twisted. He was between a rock and a hard place, I being a rock, and Mummy, clearly, the hard place. That upset me even more. She didn’t want me to come home.
My mother does not want me back!
“Why? Why can’t I come home?” I demanded with rising panic.
I heard a muffled whispering behind him. His expression brightened. “So, tell me about your young man,” he said, with such assumed heartiness that I felt my chest clutch up. That must be my mother behind him, hiding out of sight of the computer’s eye. Our private conversation was over. He would tell me no truth now.
My mouth tasted of acid. I struggled for calm. “Papaji, what’s the matter?”
He glanced behind him. Then he said quietly, “I love you, little swan.” For a horrible moment, it sounded as if he were saying goodbye.
I felt stunned and stupid. The floor had fallen away under me. A whirlwind roared in my head.
My mother shoved him aside and took his place at the computer. “Rathi, I have spoken to the priests. You are to be very ashamed of your behavior. What is your betrothed going to think if he learns you have been kissing and making disgrace in the United States with someone else?”
I pulled myself together. “Forget it. Why does Papaji say that you don’t ever want me to come home?”
“Of course you will come home,” my mother said, but her eyes shifted. “You will be a good beti and marry well, just as we have planned. Your betrothed has waited long, so that you are no longer young, and now you try to bring him damaged goods—”
“Mother, in the United States we don’t speak of women as goods, damaged or otherwise,” I said. “This is one of the advantages to living where a woman is more than a cow.”
Well, anyway, it went downhill from there. We were shouting at one another across seven and a half thousand miles by the time I cut the connection. I think I cut it first. It was hard to tell. My sight was dark with outrage, my heart thundered fearfully, and my mother’s shrill scolding rang in my ears even when I could no longer hear her words.
I stamped around my apartment until I could breathe.
Then I dug out the box in the closet where I kept things my mother sent me that angered me.
It was quite a large box by now, I noticed. Once it had held only the photograph of my betrothed in a tarnished silver frame and some letters Mummy had written when I was thirteen and very rebellious. Now it was full of her gifts. Little devotional objects, all expensively blessed by her priests. How could a woman so self-willed be so driven by religion? Especially when that religion didn’t believe in a woman’s right to be self-willed.
I found the picture of my betrothed. He looked distant and old-fashioned in the photograph, with a bad nose, no forehead, and a billowing moustache even larger than I remembered. My mother had hand-lettered his name on the back of the frame and had it blessed—there was the priest’s blessing, magic-markered in Sanskrit.
On impulse, I Googled him.
My search came up with two boys, ages five and eleven, both in Kalkota.
That was weird. I felt sure my mother would have mentioned it if he had died. This photograph was taken at least twenty years ago.
I tried the ministry where he worked. Nothing. The province. Nothing. I tried the registry of births and deaths for the province, then for the entire country.
I kept at it for forty minutes.
I could not find a trace of him.
I began to realize there was a serious problem with my status as an engaged woman.
I had no fiancé.
I thought of my mother’s angry, frightened face and my father telling me without telling me that I could never come home. I love you, little swan.
I burst out crying.
I dragged myself to work Friday, feeling like a crushed and desperate teenager and not like a partner in a major law firm. Janine brought me chai with bedside-manner-for-the-dying tenderness. When Kama came by with the morning mail, she positively glared at him.
For thirty seconds I wondered what that was about. Had he broken her heart?
I decided not. She was more motherly with me than angry with him.
Janine guarded my door all morning. I got a great deal of paper cleared off my desk. At noon she went for a doctor’s appointment, and no sooner had she left but Kama entered my office with a box of pencils. His sweet young face was solemn.
“Ms. RathiRaani, wassup?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but came to my chair and took my hand in his. He searched my face with earnest, worried eyes. “Somebody’s been busting your nuts, O my queen. Tell me who and how and I’ll kick their ass for you.”
I blinked. “You’re very sweet, but you can’t.”
He dropped to his knees before me! Then he began patting my feet! “Raani devi, O brightest star of the heavens,” he murmured.
“What—what are you—get up! Oh good God!”
He looked up, and I felt a sudden stab of memory. When I was four years old, my ayah had looked at me like that when I scolded her. She had patted my feet in the pad-grahain, too—usually when she had enraged me and wanted to win my forgiveness.
Flustered, I stood, shoving my rolling chair behind me.
He sat back on his heels at my feet, apparently completely at ease in this position, and looked up at me with mournful, contrite brown eyes.
I was less at ease. “Stop it!”
“I can’t bear it if you’re suffering,” he said, so seriously that my breath caught.
I said, “I’ve had—I’ve had uncomfortable news from home. That’s all. Thank you for your concern.”
“Can I help?” he said, and I made a wordless gesture. “Aw, please let me help?”
I stretched my hands out as if to push him away.
He merely rose on his knees and bowed his head. As if waiting for me to bless him!
Helplessly, I laid my palm on his thick, straight, black hair. I had the oddest impression that he grew larger under my hand, not visibly but in some inner way. As if my blessing…worked.
I snatched my hand away. He looked up at me again and, reaching up one finger, touched me ever so gently on the second suit button, over my solar plexus.
“You’re so strong,” he said. “Engage your will and you’ll be unstoppable.” Then he stood. He was just my height.
I had a sudden urge to seize his face as I had last week, to pull him to me and devour him again.
He seemed to feel a pull as well. He swayed toward me, his hands dangling at his sides. His chest rose and fell faster. His eyes widened.
I took a step back. “Thank you for the pencils.”
His bad-boy grin flashed. “I live to serve.”
He went out, leaving the door open. It disturbed me that I hadn’t noticed him close the door before.
What must people think?
No one said anything. I caught no odd looks. Still, I felt unsettled, conspicuous, and afire along my skin, which badly unnerved me.
If Kama had sought to improve my mood, he had succeeded. Now, when I thought of my father’s terrifying, appalling news, my mother’s refusal to discuss it, and my missing fiancé, I felt unaccountable optimism. It would work out. Something reassuring would soon come to light. Besides, I had ignored my fiancé all these years with no ill effects. I could put his nonexistence out of my mind.
I had work to do.
A deposition for Sandsreicht was scheduled for that afternoon. I would question the witness—another honor, another test.
I more than passed the test. I smashed the case wide open.
Defendant’s most intractable witness deposed—the vice president who had been present during the incident in litigation. When I fixed him with my eye and asked the questions he had never answered satisfactorily before, he blurted out the truth—before both sides’ counsels and the camera! Opposing counsel tried to stop him from destroying their case, but it was no use. These questions were not only admissible, they were questions that must be answered on behalf of defendant
in any case. I put my hands behind me, to show that I was not threatening the witness in any way, and bent my attention upon him.
He blurted it all out—precisely as our plaintiff had described.
I got him to repeat it four times in the next ten minutes.
When they left at last, defense counsel looked gray about the lips, and the witness shambled out of the conference room like a broken schoolboy.
My second-most-senior partner Davis thumped me on the back with glee. “Sandsreicht will shit their pants! You’re cross-examining for me in District Court tomorrow!” he crowed.
Encouraged, I decided to tackle Janine next. There had been just that little something in her manner, earlier today, as she defended me from Kama’s box of pencils, that had given me pause.
But I found it surprisingly difficult to find a way to ask any of my questions. For someone who had spent her career digging up the truth about misbehavior in the workplace, I could barely frame a question in my mind, let alone speak it.
Why did you chase Kama away from me this morning? Has he maybe dated you and broken your heart? Are you a member of the new Kamadeva cult? When he kissed you, did your skin catch fire and smoke issue from your underpants and did your crotch blister? Does he make you dream strange dreams? Do you lie awake at night wondering what his bedroom is like, wishing he could watch Venus and Jupiter shining outside through the window with you?
No, I couldn’t ask any of that.
Ironically, I was precisely in the same position as the plaintiff in Sandsreicht was, early in her relationship with her boss…before he dumped her and began trying to hound her out of her job.
Except, as a partner, I was the employer and Kama was the employee.
Never again could I let him shut the door to my office so that we could be alone inside. He had done it without my even noticing. Now I was at risk, and so was he.
Chapter Ten
The news that Rathi had busted Sandsreicht wide open came late that afternoon. I spotted her being hustled into Irene Bentwater’s office for what I suspected would be a celebratory snort of whiskey. She was glowing.
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