by Shruti Swamy
And yet I had nearly separated this woman, Mrs. B, whose face was held tightly and who wielded her English with frightening precision, from the loving and indulgent woman who featured in my husband’s childhood stories; I still, somehow, loved that woman, and enjoyed hearing about her. Through the transitive property of marriage, she was mine in memory. Many days, as I walked, I could see her in my mind’s eye standing on the verandah, calling out to her son across the neighborhood, past the distance her voice could penetrate, but which nonetheless reached his ears and sent him running toward it, and, scaling the slope that led to his parents’ home, he could see the outline of her before the particulars, the dusk-pink of her sari in its immaculate folds, and the softness of her face. I’m coming, I’m coming, he’d call back to her in dreams, running and running up that hill but not able to reach the top where she stood, still calling, unaware that he was right there, and trying, but unable to reach her.
“Have you ever been to Delhi?”
“No.” I had never been anywhere. Sometimes I realized, as I dreamed of Paris or New York, that my own country could offer many escapes that I did not allow my imagination to explore. Why was I so occupied with getting all the way out? I thought it might have something to do with my body, the way, in public, I so often felt vulnerable, wilting under the eyes of men, who were emboldened, I think, by my dark skin, and by my modesty, moved to make ever more lewd comments outside the presence of my husband. But it was not quite that; it might have been even more than that, a desire to leave the rest of my history, to become so anonymous under the public’s gaze that no one would be able to read me: my dark face and my plain sari would be a mask instead of a tell—that they would therefore approach me warmly and kindly, as they approached a man. But of course this position was naive to the extreme: surely no place in life offered that. “Is it beautiful?”
“Yes,” said my dance teacher. “The most beautiful gardens in the world are there. Would you like to go?”
I was rapidly progressing at my dance. And so the world seemed full, made of movement, offering something secret that I could almost understand. I felt very close to understanding. The way the sea rippled in the evenings along the shore, adding variation to the lines it cast on the sand, following a pattern, but elaborating on it; the various poses of trees, some curled, bent, as though old, some standing broadly with their arms thrown up, some gripping both the earth and the sky, and one immense banyan growing between my teacher’s house and my own, whose movement was stillness, draped in its own concentration; the running of dogs along the shore, wild and barking at one another and the waves; the crows’ bodies in flight, moving with an almost brutal power; and, of course, the movements of people, which defined their bodies, bent or upstanding, soft or hard, feminine, graceless, or like water, so gentle, the way children would throw their bodies forward, even the girls, the shy gesture of a student’s hand brushing the hair from her forehead—more graceful than her pained mudras—the arms of the neighbor’s servant as she hung light-dripping clothes on the line. All these were not scored by music, or even rhythm, yet they were coordinated, as though by infinite and subtle concert, each communicating something, alone, and in relation to one another they gained even more meaning—meaning that I could not, not quite yet, grasp. In my dance there was a ceiling, a limit: I came close, I could brush my fingers if I reached, but I could not reach it, straining, straining, pulling the string of my body tighter. And afterward, sweating and almost crying, not because I was frustrated or even sad, but from sheer effort. Close. To what, I could not say. Not quite say. What was on the other side? It was a field of unbroken light.
My husband showed me a poem he had written. He wrote in English, privately, in the evenings when he got home from work. He wrote longhand and then typed what he had written on a typewriter, a big beautiful machine that filled the flat with its noise. The rhythm was erratic, but not, it seemed, random; at times, I unconsciously marked its syncopation as I went about my evening tasks, the noise marking these tasks as the tabla marked my dancing, or the sound of my teacher’s voice. I always looked, reflexively, for women in the poems he wrote, though often there weren’t any: his poems were populated with animals, as this one was, a poem about a dog we had seen walking along on the shore. His dog was very alone, dark black and wet, lost; it was a plain poem that spoke of a loneliness that frightened me. I handed it back. Are you so alone? I wanted to ask him. Did he miss so terribly his old life, and the people who had populated it? His face seemed pensive as always, carrying the melancholy air that I had noticed so long ago from my hostel window—yet this air was what made his face so tricky, for often it opened to a smile very suddenly, like a door burst open, and the sweetness of the smile was sharpened by the distance the face seemed to have traveled to arrive at it. His eyes too—green—as my schoolmate Ruchi’s, her most prized possession, and I had imagined she slept with her hands cupped over her sockets so no one would steal them. Born rich, my husband was more careless with precious things. “Well?”
“You know I don’t know anything about poetry.”
“That means you don’t like it.”
“No, I like it. It just—makes me feel . . . empty.”
“Empty?” he said, not displeased.
“What’s it called?”
“I’m thinking ‘The Dog.’ They’re going to publish it in damn you.”
“Is that good?”
“Yes,” he said. “I know—that name. They’re trying to be cheeky.”
“You only show me your poems when they’re going to be published.”
“Well, you don’t like to practice in front of me.”
“That’s true.”
We went outside. It was evening. The beach-houses were all full this weekend, due perhaps to the city’s unseasonable heat, and the shore was littered with the children of film producers and bankers, building sand structures with small shovels and small hands. Farther out, the fishermen were pulling their boats in from the day’s harvest, brightly painted boats bestowed with the eyes of gods to spot the shoals of fish; dark, lean bodies pulling these boats through the mist that gathered there along the curve of the bay, but still visible, the bodies and the eyes, and the boats heaped with silver. Women came to meet them at the edge of the water. Only movement, no sound, for the sea swallowed the words they spoke to one another. My husband lit a cigarette. “Why is it,” he said, after a while, “that you only ever wear the same three saris? You never wear the blue one for example.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” he said, “it’s odd, only. I have more clothes than you do.”
I began to blush. “Well, it’s just that . . . I’m saving them.”
“For what—your funeral? Don’t you like them?”
“Yes.”
“So if you like them, wear them.”
It was so simple for him. Sometimes I would pull the blue one out when I was alone, and open it across the bed, and spread my hands along its length. There was a subtle undulating variance in color I thought I could feel, the way the sky might feel at dusk under the palms. Another thing Radha would laugh at. But with pleasure.
“Anyway I have something to tell you. My teacher is performing in three months in Delhi. And she wants me to go with her.”
“Tell me or ask me?” my husband said.
“Tell you,” I said. “I thought you’d be pleased.”
“I can’t get the time off to go to Delhi.”
“That’s okay.”
“So you’ll be alone there.”
“I’ll be with my teacher.”
“She’s a woman.”
“I thought you would be pleased. I’m performing too.”
“I’m pleased.”
“You don’t seem pleased.”
He looked at me. When his face wasn’t smiling, it could be so cool, almost unreadable. He had thick eyelids and long lashes; the hooded eyes, I thought then, of a bird of prey. But it wa
s perhaps just that I didn’t understand men. There was something you had to do with them I had not learned, a kind of surface deference you must perform, smiling like a mask, as you enacted your own will. My father had not required this.
“What’s in Delhi anyway? And who’s paying for it?”
“The festival’s paying. Train fare, hotels, meals, everything. And we’ll have a dinner with the president of the arts council.”
“It looks like you’ve already decided.”
“What’s there to decide?”
He exhaled, turning his face away from me to blow out the smoke. When he turned his face toward me again he was smiling. In his face, in his eyes, I saw my friend, the one who had sung to me a love song at the empty train station in the early hours of the morning, the one who had looked with his camera eyes not just at me but in me as I danced. The one I too had seen, shy and lovely, openhearted as a boy. “Good,” he said, “very good. My wife the famous dancer.”
One evening we had a party. Many men and fewer women arrived at our flat, bemused by the length of their journeys but in good spirits, claiming that the air was fresher out here. Some poets, some musicians, a screenwriter, the artists all men, and the women all girlfriends, no dancers, no wives, bearing bottles of beer and whiskey that clinked together cheerfully in the jute bags that they were carried in. Everyone was dressed in Western clothes, the women in trousers or a long skirt, and so though it was my party I felt silly and wrongly dressed in my blue-dusk sari. “Come have a drink!” my husband said to me, and I demurred as I always did. We had a record player, a fine and beautiful instrument I cared for like a child, and though we had precious few records, we listened to them often, Ravi Shankar especially in the evenings, which many times reminded me of evenings on the roof of the chaali, where I could watch blue fall over the city before all the electric lights buzzed on, watching the activity of the children from a great height as I began my change into a night-creature who had no need for companions; a blue feeling in which the music seemed to shape itself to the fresh, living moment. On this night someone had brought a record of the Beatles, of whose music we only had a single album, and whose English I had trouble understanding, and so absorbed was I in making out the words of a particularly beautiful song that I did not at first notice that the eyes of the party were on me, all of them, and that someone had said something that had turned their eyes to me and made them laugh. What it was I will never know but my husband said, “Come, come, Vidya, have a little sip, celebrate with me.”
I put a hand over my mouth to block the glass he was trying to press to my lips. The smell of whiskey smarted my eyes, making me desirous and sad. “Women don’t drink whiskey.”
“Since when were you worried about what women did or did not do?”
“You married the satya savitri, yaar,” said another poet, the red of whose eyes seemed to burn against the whites. “Now you can’t expect her to behave like these . . . girlfriends.”
Under this blow none of the women winced, though some of the smiles on their mouths hardened. I understood English very well, but had the feeling that another language was being spoken under the words they used, one for which I had no textbook or tutor, and whose meaning was so slippery it evaded my grasp. Tonight it had a hard quality to it, the quality of metal being struck.
“She’ll have a drink for me,” my husband said, and poured the glass, still speaking the under-language, which darkened his face. “Just for me, Vidya. The liberated woman, free from conventions.”
“What about the convention that a wife must obey her husband?”
“Obey? No, indulge.” He took me by the wrist, hard, but his voice was still playful. “Not even my wife will celebrate with me? What will all these people think?”
“They don’t mind.”
“They’ll think you think you’re better than them.”
“I don’t.”
“But they’ll think that and I’ll think that too.”
“I’m not better than anyone.” My voice became more and more quiet.
“Look at the way you’re standing here, in your nun’s sari, always frowning frowning frowning, so proper and middle class and correct.”
I put my hands to my face. And it was true, I had been frowning. I saw myself all at once the way he showed me, small, serious, dark, in old-fashioned clothes, sitting silently as I always did at the edge of the conversation, trying hard to follow it or dipping for a few moments into my own thoughts, and looking—yes, bored. They were all wondering why my husband had married her.
“Such a good wife, such a good woman—”
I lifted the glass to my lips and took it all in one swallow. It was bitter, and burned all the way down. A few laughed at the face I made when I was finished, but the drama was over, and the focus of the party shifted away. A cheerful song played on the flipped record, but the layers of instruments seemed now to clash with one another, and the hollow sitar was played by a hideously inexpert hand. I dreaded the feeling that was beginning to build, and the pleasure I took from it: all at once like a room opening: a bright utterly spacious and friendly room filled with delightful objects. Was this how my brother felt? I would have liked to be alone with it, but there were people covering every surface of the apartment, leaning against the wall, seated on the bed, and some even on the floor, for we had only one rickety wooden chair where Rustom wrote his poems, and where he sat now, lush and triumphant if not quite handsome, for the drink made his features come slightly off kilter from their sober axis. He was not a big man, I noticed as though for the first time; his frame was only slightly larger than mine, and, I thought now, if I ever were to pull on a pair of his bell-bottom jeans they would surely fit me. He looked quite young sitting there, almost on the verge of tears, I thought I saw just the edge of it, the gleam around his eye.
He drank and drank. I stumbled through a conversation with a girl whose eyelids were painted a soft white-blue; under her adult makeup she revealed herself to be quite young, with the chaste shyness of a village-cousin, speaking in a slight, breathy voice that she seemed unused to using. She wanted to be an actress, and her boyfriend, the screenwriter, had gotten her a few background roles in three recent films. Had I seen them? I had seen two of them, and to please her, I said, “I thought you looked familiar.” She beamed. “It all comes down to who you know. Some of these people,” she lowered her voice, “could make your entire career with just one snap.
“I’m happy to talk to you, didi. You’re famous to us.”
“Famous?” They could not have known about Delhi, but had, perhaps, seen me dance.
“Yes, he married you.”
“Oh—” Well, of course. They had other dreams too.
“If Rohit would marry me, I’d give it up, acting.”
“I still dance.”
“Yes, yes,” she said, “but you’ll give it up once you have children, won’t you?”
“No, we don’t want children. We’re happy like this.”
She looked at me with surprise. “You never want to be a mother?”
“Do you?”
“Yes, of course,” she said. “But you? How else do you plan to return to his family’s good graces?”
“I don’t care about their good graces.”
She was looking at me strangely. “You are very idealistic aren’t you? Well, you’re still newly wed. You’ll change your mind. And be practical,” she said, “how much longer can a boy who grew up with so much money content himself with so much less? It would be good,” she said, she the older one now, her voice growing more sure with her advice, “for you to have a child. He would never leave you, the parents would have you back, you would have money, your husband would write more poems, you would all be very happy.”
“We’re happy right now.”
“Yes, yes,” she said. “Now is one thing. Tomorrow is another.”
Soon our flat was too small for the party to continue: they were visiting someone else’s beach bu
ngalow farther down the shore, where another larger party awaited. But my husband would not go, and after much protestation the party left him still seated on his chair. I lifted the bedspread and shook it out in the doorway. It was smudged here and there with ash, and one black spot where a lit cigarette had briefly pressed. But we did not have another. Where was Radha on this night? Awake, for it was late morning in Saint Louis Missouri. Did she now wear blue jeans? I could picture her only in a yellow sari, not even in the jacket that she would need to wear against the snow and cold.