One Amazing Thing

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  “I FELL IN LOVE, OF COURSE,” JIANG SAID. “WHAT IS FORBIDDEN is attractive. Also what is different. Also, when it is the first time. Put all of them together, they make strong wine.”

  Whatever Mohit’s original intentions, he, too, succumbed to that intoxication soon enough. Additionally, as he observed her at work (sometimes, daringly, he would come to the store), he was taken by her fierce business acumen, her canny bargaining, her ability to match customers with the product best suited to them. Then there were the stories she told, about growing up in what he thought of as the Forbidden Palace. Were there really such fantastical places in Calcutta? He had to see for himself. And so, after a few months of clandestine meetings and stolen kisses in restaurants and movie theaters and the dusty carrels in the backs of university libraries, he armed himself with a box of Flurys cream pastries and persuaded Jiang to take him to her father so he could ask for her hand in marriage. The expected fireworks ensued. The grandmother threw a fit and threatened to return to China. (No one was too concerned by this, however; the family had migrated to India generations ago and did not even remember the name of their ancestral village.) But what surprised Jiang was that her father, usually so malleable, dug in his heels.

  “He told me my marriage would fail,” Jiang said. “When I told him I loved Mohit, he said, Can fish love birds?”

  Finally he couldn’t withstand her tears. He gave Jiang and Mohit reluctant permission to keep seeing each other. After a year, if they still felt the same way, he would reconsider the matter.

  Mohit’s family proved tougher. Devout Hindus and staunch Bengalis, they were devastated by the prospect of their only son, carrier of the generations-proud Das name, marrying a Chee-nay heathen. The thought of slant-eyed, octopus-eating grandchildren sent Mohit’s mother’s blood pressure rocketing, confining her to bed. Mohit’s father sat him down for a man-to-man talk, in the course of which he informed him clearly that he would never give permission for such a perversion to occur in his family. The girl must have bewitched you, he said, to make you forget your responsibilities as a son and a brother. I’ve heard the Chinese have sorcerers that specialize in such things. How will we ever get Meenakshi married into a decent family if you persist with this ridiculous idea? Later he added, Have an affair, if you’re so besotted. Get her out of your system. Then we’ll look for a proper match for you—a woman I won’t be ashamed to introduce to Calcutta society as my daughter-in-law.

  An incensed Mohit moved out of his parents’ house to stay with a college friend in his hostel. Soon after that, three men showed up at the shoe store and informed Mr. Feng that bad things would happen to his daughter if she didn’t leave Mohit alone. A shaken Mr. Feng forbade Jiang to leave the house. Chafing in her confinement, Jiang began to hate the home she had cherished until now. She was able to call Mohit at his office for only a few minutes each day, speaking in hurried whispers when her grandmother was taking her bath.

  Mohit assured her of his love. He wasn’t going to buckle under his father’s pressure. They would elope. They would go to Darjeeling or Goa. He told her to pack her valuables and be ready. But he sounded harried. She could tell he missed his family; she understood how torn he felt. As she hid an old suitcase under her bed and filled it with clothes and the few jewels she owned, the thought of her father’s face when he discovered her defection pierced her with guilt. As she lay awake at night, imagining her life with Mohit in a hill town, or in a seaside cottage awash with bougainvilleas, she worried that one day each might blame the other for what that life cost them.

  Who knows how things would have turned out? But both Jiang’s grandmother and Mohit’s mother, convinced of the imminent ruin of their families, sought divine intervention. The grandmother lit joss sticks at Kuan Yin’s shrine; the mother offered hibiscus garlands to the goddess at Kalighat. They both asked for the same boon: May Mohit and Jiang’s relationship break up, and may they subsequently marry someone suitable from their own communities.

  Over millennia, people have bewailed with some justification the tardiness of the mills of the gods, but in this case they began grinding at once, though perhaps not quite in the way the requesters had envisioned. Three days after the petitions, a unit of the People’s Liberation Army of China attacked an Indian patrol in the Aksai Chin region of the western Himalayas, setting into motion the Sino-Indian War of 1962. The PLA advanced south past the McMahon Line into Indian territory, attacks spread to the eastern Himalayas and thus closer to Calcutta, and Chinese forces took over both banks of the Namka Chu River. Intelligence reports cited massive Chinese war preparations along the border. News of dead or captured jawans appeared in the papers. The Chinese consulate shut down, rumors of Mao’s plan to bomb Calcutta ran rampant, and panic flared in the city.

  People stopped patronizing Chinese businesses. Stores were vandalized. A popular Chinese restaurant was set on fire because a group of customers got food poisoning and believed it was part of a deliberate plot to kill Indians. Chinese banks failed. Crimson slashes of graffiti denouncing Chinese spies appeared on the walls of houses where Chinese families were known to live. The government ordered individuals of Chinese origin to register themselves and present papers for identification. Jiang and her brother were lucky. They had been born in a hospital and had Indian birth certificates. But many others, whose families had been in the country for generations—like their Indian counterparts—had never thought of acquiring official papers. Jiang’s father was one of these.

  “He was placed under house arrest,” Jiang said. “We had to lock up Feng’s and let the employees go. We didn’t know what would happen to our property, or to us. Our friends had similar problems. Vincent quit his practice. No one trusted a Chinese dentist anymore. We spent our time at home glued to the radio, trying to guess our fate. There were terrible rumors. Many friends abandoned their property and left the country. Every day the Calcutta port was jammed with Chinese trying to get berths on ships.

  “I called Mohit again and again. He wasn’t there. Once a coworker picked up his phone and told me Mohit had taken leave because his mother’s health was worse. He asked my name. I didn’t give it, but I could tell he was suspicious. After that I was afraid to call, but I couldn’t bear not to. If someone else answered, I hung up. Then one day Mohit called me from a public phone. He told me to get out of Calcutta as soon as possible. He had heard that the Chinese were being sent to internment camps. Then he said that he couldn’t phone or see me again. Already he had received threats because people knew about me. He was afraid his family would be targeted as sympathizers. The worry was making his mother sicker. Forgive me, he said. I love you, but I can’t fight a whole country. Then he hung up.

  “I felt like my world had ended. I couldn’t believe Mohit could let me down like this. I couldn’t even tell my family (who had their own problems) how much it hurt.”

  Mohit’s sources had been accurate. Within a couple of days, Jiang’s family was notified that they must leave the country or relocate to an internment camp in Rajasthan, all the way across India. Those who did not obey would be forcibly deported to China. Jiang’s father knew that going back to China under the yoke of Mao’s Communist regime was out of the question. From refugees in the 1950s, he had heard stories of the labor camps rife with starvation and disease, the massacre of those labeled traitors to the Party. And he no longer trusted the government of India, this country that he had mistakenly loved as his own. He tried desperately to get his children out of the country—Vancouver or Brazil, San Francisco or Sydney or Fiji—it did not matter where. (Paperless as he and his mother were, he knew they had no hope.) But the Chinese exodus was at its peak. There were no airplane tickets, no ocean berths. Mr. Feng was willing to pay a hefty bribe, but he discovered that others had already paid equally hefty bribes.

  Two days before the family was to board the train that would transport them to the hot, dry quarry town of Deoli, Vincent managed to locate a friend—an acquaintance, really—who
m he had met a couple of times at the Chinese Dentists Club. Curtis Chan was the lucky possessor of a berth on a ship that was to leave for America in the morning—and he was a bachelor. That evening, unknown to Jiang, her father and brother bribed the guard posted outside their house and went to Curtis Chan’s home. They took with them Jiang’s photograph, a stack of dollars that Mr. Feng had managed to procure by calling in favors, several of his rare calligraphy scrolls, and all her mother’s jewelry.

  Curtis Chan was a practical man. He had been approached by two families with unmarried daughters earlier that day, and at the very moment the Fengs rang his doorbell, he had been getting ready to phone one of them. But perhaps he had a romantic streak in him, too, or a love of art. Otherwise why would he, after examining Jiang’s photograph and one of the scrolls, agree to Mr. Feng’s proposition, even though one of the other families had offered him as many dollars, more valuable jewelry, and, additionally, a bag of gold Krugerrands? Vincent was dispatched home to fetch his sister. Mr. Feng and Mr. Chan—it is appropriate that we should address him in this manner, because as Jiang was about to discover, he was decidedly older than her brother and going bald, besides—hurried to the Buddhist temple in Tangra.

  “And, just like that,” Jiang said, “I was married.”

  Under normal circumstances, Jiang would have balked at the summary manner in which her father had decided her fate, yoking her to this middle-aged, stocky stranger, without even asking her opinion. But since Mohit’s phone call, she had been walking around in a numb haze that gave way periodically to fits of furious tears. One moment she wanted a bomb to obliterate all of Calcutta, or at least the Das household. The next moment she wanted time to rewind itself to that day at Feng’s so that she could leave the shop before Mohit arrived, and thus avoid the entire heartache of loving him. At other times she longed for Mohit to break down the door of the Feng mansion and carry her away to a place where her Chineseness would not matter. Buffeted by contradictions, she stood in the Buddhist temple, under the ominous shadows thrown by a single, shaky candle (Calcutta was under blackout orders), and did as the priest instructed, her motions jerky as a puppet’s. It was only the next morning, as she was about to board the Sea Luck, that she seemed to realize the enormity of what had happened. She threw her arms around her father, insisting that she would not leave him, that she would rather that they died together. It took her brother and her new husband all their strength to get her up the gangplank while her father, himself in tears, tried to console her. I’ll be fine. I’ll be back in the house once the government sorts things out. Then I’ll come to America to pay you a visit. And your brother will join you soon. We’ll get him on another ship in a few days.

  None of the things he promised came to pass. Within a year, he died of a heart attack at the camp, his devastated mother following him soon after. As for Vincent, he did get on a ship, but one bound for Australia, and it was years before he and his sister found each other.

  “That was the last time anyone would see me cry,” Jiang said.

  The monthlong voyage seemed endless, with the Chans cooped up in a minuscule cabin with another newly married couple. (Upon boarding they had discovered that the captain, taking advantage of the helplessness of his customers, had double-sold tickets.) Mr. Chan and Mr. Lu, understanding that they had no recourse, made the best of it. They divided the little space they had with a blanket that served as a curtain, made up a bed on the floor where each couple slept on alternate nights, and created a strict timetable for the use of the cabin so that they would each get some privacy with their wives. This had a twofold result. Mr. Chan and Mr. Lu formed a lifelong friendship, and by the end of the voyage, Jiang was pregnant.

  How did she feel about this last development? Did joy course through her as the baby grew? Or did she feel sick with worry at the prospect of having a child in a place where she knew no one who could support her through childbirth and into motherhood? Did she feel fondness for the child’s father—or perhaps even the beginnings of love? Did she resent him for imprisoning her in a bloated body that would no longer fit into the pretty clothes she brought from Calcutta? Did she compare him with someone else who had kissed her more tenderly? Or did she tolerate him with resignation, because what choice did she have?

  In America, they moved from city to city until Mr. Chan was forced to accept the fact that his dentist’s degree was worthless here. Finally, they sold Jiang’s jewelry and bought a small grocery in a Chinatown. Jiang helped in the store, dividing her attention between the customers and the babies—one, then two, in the playpen in the tiny back room. She was so good at managing the business that by the time the babies grew into children, the store had expanded into a supermarket and the Chans lived in a comfortable apartment above it. The family bought another supermarket and then a third; the children were sent to private schools; they moved to a large and lavish apartment in a gated building.

  Everything Jiang required for daily life lay within the boundaries of Chinatown—markets, movie theaters, the houses of friends, the children’s schools. Was there another need? If so, she buried that hankering deep within herself. In this new, compacted existence, there was no necessity for her to speak English, so she let it go. And, along with the language she had once prided herself on speaking so well, she let go of that portion of her past where English had played an important part. By the time her grandchildren were born, she communicated only in Mandarin.

  Sometimes in the evenings Mr. Lu, now a widower, visited Mr. Chan. Jiang served them tea and dim sum but never joined in their wistful reminiscences. Her brother, Vincent, having finally managed to locate her, paid them a visit from Australia, where after decades of hard work he had risen to be the manager of—ah, ironic world!—a shoe factory. She was happy to see him, if in a bemused kind of way. (This stooped, tobacco-chewing man with a shock of salt-and-pepper hair did not seem to her to be connected in any way to the young man she had left behind on the docks of Calcutta, dressed in a crisp white button-down shirt.) When he brought up their childhood, waxing poetic about the hidden mansion in which they were raised, she refused to indulge in nostalgia with him. Only fools chewed the cud of the past.

  But something was dislodged inside her as she listened to her husband and her brother conversing. After Vincent left, she found herself sitting by her bedroom window, staring out. Instead of the busy streets of Chinatown she saw an enclosed courtyard, roses spilling over a stone bench, children running around a fountain, screaming with laughter. The moon rose, shaking her heart with its beauty. Her father recited poetry, and she mouthed the words along with him. Each day she could smell the mango trees more distinctly. Inside her, emptiness grew until she felt like a hollowed-out bamboo. So when Mr. Chan passed away and Vincent wrote that he was planning a trip to Calcutta to decide whether he wanted to retire there, she wrote back impulsively—surprising herself, because she had thought herself long done with impulsiveness—that she would meet him in the city of her youth.

  “Why am I going?” Jiang said. She shrugged and spread her hands. “Not sure. End of story.”

  7

  In the silence that shimmered in the wake of Jiang’s story, each member of the company—for listening had made them into that—was busy with his or her thoughts. They went about their tasks, which had been assigned by Cameron or dictated by their bodies, but inside them the story still traveled, glowing and tumbling end over end, like a meteor in a slow-motion movie clip.

  Malathi stirred a pan of Kool-Aid in the weakening light that Cameron had switched on—for only a few minutes, he warned—and thought of Jiang’s parting from her father. It pulled up uncomfortable memories of the last time she had seen her own family, outside the security gate at the airport in Chennai. They had forgiven her and traveled by train all the way from Coimbatore to say good-bye, although she had indicated that it was quite unnecessary. How embarrassed she had been by their garish clothing, their loud, provincial accents. Her mother’s teary hugs,
her father’s admonitions to be a decent girl and keep out of trouble, her sisters’ lists of items they wanted from America—all of it had made her glad she was leaving. Now she would probably never see them again. With that realization, every item on the lists her sisters had compiled in their innocent greed (items she had pushed out of her mind even before she boarded the airplane) came back to haunt her: Hershey’s Kisses, bars of Dove soap, Revlon lipsticks, copies of Good Housekeeping and Glamour, and diaries with a little lock and key.

  Then she thought of Mohit’s fickleness, typical of men. This made her so angry that she almost upset the pan of Kool-Aid.

  Tariq had not moved from his seat, not even to raise his feet onto the rungs of the chair as Cameron had advised, although he could feel water seeping into his shoes. He, too, was thinking, his forehead scrunched from contemplation. He should have been checking his cell phone, but instead he considered the nature of governments. How they couldn’t be trusted. How they turned on you when you least expected it, when you had been a law-abiding, good-hearted citizen, and locked you up as though you were a criminal. Why would anyone want to live in a country that did that to their father?

  Mangalam tried the office lines, but only half his mind registered that they were still dead. With the other half of his mind he was thinking about the passion with which the young Jiang had loved Mohit, a passion frozen into foreverness by the destiny that separated them. A passion that he suspected, by the tremor in the old woman’s voice, still existed. Jiang had cursed fate for separating them, but wasn’t she lucky, in a way? Had they married, at best their love would have been like the comfort of slipping one’s feet into a pair of old shoes. At worst, it would have been like his life. (Mangalam, too, had loved his wife in the beginning. He remembered the fact of that love, though not how it had felt. That memory was gone completely, like a computer file wiped out by a virus.) Love, when alive, is a garland, he thought. When dead, it’s a garotte. He felt rather pleased with himself for having come up with the metaphor. Lily and Uma were helping Cameron check the condition of the ceiling.