The Archer

by Shruti Swamy

  “Make me one cup of strong coffee, will you?”

  I clicked on the stove. Could marriage be a dance? I thought: no. You never really dance with someone else. You only dance with yourself. I burned my finger and sucked it, but even that pain felt distant. I brought my husband his coffee and he sat me on his lap while he drank it. “What is it you want?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I said. He was petting my arm. His hands were rough from his boy-years gripping a cricket bat.

  “Go be a sannyasi then, if you want nothing.”

  “I want to be your wife,” I said, cautiously—his voice had a bitter edge. I should have been irritated because of his behavior all evening, even angry, but I wasn’t. I felt small and plain, a little sick from the alcohol: someone easy to leave. When he didn’t offer anything else I said, “Those women your friends brought. Will they marry them?”

  “Not likely.”

  “What will happen to them when their boyfriends get tired?”

  “They’ll find another man, probably a richer man, in fact they might find him before the boyfriend gets tired.”

  “What if they get pregnant?”

  “They take care of it. No one wants to get married. Not the men and not the girls either.”

  I touched his rough cheek. He was sweating in his kurta, brightly patterned, but cotton as always to announce his poverty. His arms smelled faintly of roses, having picked up some ambient perfume. “I’m sorry I was frowning. Why didn’t you go with them? It’s good for you to get out of the flat.”

  “You want me out of the flat?”

  “No,” I said, “it’s not that. It’s for your sake.”

  “Am I a bad man, am I a worthless man?”

  “How could you say that?”

  “You want me to be nothing—well, I am!”

  I wiped the tears from his cheeks. I could not see into his eyes, they were odd and glassy, almost angry. “What are you saying?”

  “I don’t—love it, like you.”

  “Love it? Love what?”

  He shook his head. It was distressing him greatly but he could not bring himself to say it.

  “Love what?” I said again, trying not to be alarmed, stroking his cheeks with my fingers. “Our life? Love me?”

  “No, no,” he said. “Not that.” I held him and listened to him cry. It was an aching, plaintive sound that wet the front of my blouse. Was it just the alcohol? I took him to bed, undressed him, as though I were the experienced one. I led him to me and I surrendered.

  But then I fell terribly ill. I could keep nothing down except for salt biscuits and softdrink both brought to me by my penitent and anxious husband. I had strange cravings that inspired in me dread: I desired many of the sweets and snacks that I craved in my childhood, their broad and subtle flavors, which I had spent hours and hours as a girl reconstructing, dry, flaky, drenched with honey, dusted with silver foil and some glittering, precise crumbs of salt, and had been infused in my memory with such longing that the memory had outmatched the sweets themselves, and each time I tasted one now it was with a bitter tongue. There seemed to be nothing in my stomach but bile that burned my throat, my tongue, and even my teeth. And yet beside the nausea there was a horrible hunger.

  I cannot logically explain how or why those days became so close around me, except perhaps that it was that I was too sick to dance: thus closed the aperture of the world: I felt it slipping from me. Afternoons alone in the cottage the light pierced my eyes, giving me headaches of an intensity I had never experienced before, but which I remember afflicting my mother. Between the bouts of pain and nausea, I experienced some clearings of not-pain and not-nausea, during which my soul hesitantly peered into my body and even experimentally crawled, for a few moments, inside. The body the soul entered was drenched, for I sweated now more than I ever had, and braided into my usual smell was a new odor, one stinking, metallic note that disturbed me, and suddenly the air passed cool over the skin, I could feel the wet sea air in my lungs and against my palms in a stunning pleasure that carried with it no joy: it was simply the body’s response to certain soft stimulus and the absence of pain. At the heart of the small cottage I lay, prone, sweating, breathing, my life whittled down to the relief of my body, and then charging back into my body’s pain, and the soul fled. When my husband came home, he would wipe my forehead, tenderly but grimly, with a cool rag. “It’s time to see the doctor, my darling.”

  “No.”

  “It’s been weeks of this. I’m worried.”

  “You’re not worried.”

  “Of course I am,” he said. “How could you say that?”

  I turned my face away from him. I didn’t want to see a doctor; I was afraid what he would say. Beside my fear was my husband’s eagerness for the same news, an eagerness I could not bear. Delhi was in a month: I would not go, for I had not been able to practice, I had sent word to my teacher through my husband, who softened the news of her disappointment. How much could she guess? With her regard she sent some herbal water she had prepared, muddy brown and bitter and cool against the throat, which soothed my body and made it drowsy: then it would sleep. She sent this water but she would not come herself. If she had come to the door I may have refused her, from shame.

  An appointment was made; we took a taxi, which we could not afford, but which I did not have the will to protest. I shut my eyes and opened them in the clinic. The doctor was looking at me through his gleaming glasses. His touch, equally impersonal and intimate, produced in me a long, ugly feeling, almost in itself a kind of nausea, and I sat for some moments reeling at the table after he was finished. I did not like to be touched there. “You’re with child, my dear. I’m sure your husband will be pleased.”

  The words were not surprising, not blinding. They felt like alcohol, stinging and sweet. A baby, with my husband’s dear, green eyes? And what of me—my hands, my smile? And yet, if one arm held the child, the other would not be free to dance. My body and his body had conspired.

  “I’ll call him in then, while you dress.”

  “Wait—!”

  His head had a crust of hair, white as ice. He looked amused. “Yes?”

  “Is there—well—can there be some way—that is—is there anything to be done?”

  “Be done?” he said, not yet sternly.

  “Yes,” I said, looking down at my lap, draped in a green cloth that had been provided to me, and below it, my own nakedness. We had driven for a long time to get to this clinic—a long time in a taxi, so an expensive ride—and the clinic itself, so clean and quiet, with its green cloths and offers to my husband to provide him a soft drink—must be expensive too. I tried again, “Is there something I can do—”

  “I don’t think I understand you,” he said. “You’re quite healthy, you need rest, eat lots of dhal and eat greens—mustard greens are good—and you must avoid at all costs papaya. Your mother-in-law will be happy to prepare some special foods for you, I’m sure, so you can enjoy your rest.”

  “No,” I said. “If a woman is not quite—ah—ready—to be . . . Once my friend got into trouble and she told me there was a procedure. Something you could do. To fix the problem.”

  “You’re not in trouble,” said the doctor now very stern. His hair so white but his face was smooth, but for the folded brow my vexing request had caused. His hands too were unlined and smooth, and on his left he wore a wedding ring like a Christian. “You’re married, you’re healthy, your child, as far as we can tell, will be healthy, you’re at a good age for your first baby, and there’s nothing to fear, these days, there is so much to be done for a woman in labor, I’m speaking medically, especially a difficult labor. As for the sex of the child, well, we just can’t know that, so you must pray to god for a boy.”

  “I can pay you,” I said.

  “I’m being well paid my dear by your in-laws right now.”

  “They’re paying you?” I blurted out, before I could think to disguise my ignorance.

&nbs
p; “My fee is not inexpensive,” he said proudly. “Don’t you love your husband?”

  “Of course I do. But—”

  “Well, then,” he said. “That’s all there is to the matter, isn’t it?”

  “You could just say—it was an accident, that I was never pregnant—or that something happened—something naturally—”

  “Put this nonsense out of your head,” the doctor said almost angrily, and then he softened his tone. “It’s natural to be afraid of birth. But you’ll find that modern medicine—and you will have the best, you understand, you must have some sense of how lucky you are—modern medicine offers much to the expectant mother. So you see there is no reason to be frightened. You might find the pregnancy does pleasing things to your figure. I’ve seen it often with women so skinny like you. The figure . . . comes into bloom. You will be pleased, and your husband also will be pleased, I think.” His look then was not so hard to read, and I cast my eyes to the flecked green tiles of the floor trying to keep the sick-feeling down. When he got no response from me he called in my husband. “Everything’s looking too good,” said the doctor. “You’ll have a healthy child.”

  “A boy?” said my husband. He looked young, flushed, pleased in his suit; he had come from work.

  “Well of course we can’t know. I know your parents are quite keen.”

  “Yes,” my husband said. “Well, we just want a healthy child, isn’t it, Vidya?”

  And then another taxi home. The money should have been no mystery. He couldn’t help telling the driver, “Brother, today is a good day, we’ve got some good news!” which the driver, understanding the euphemism, met with many effusive congratulations, angling for a bigger tip upon our arrival. I was so embarrassed I pulled my pallu over my head and sat in its private shade as though a bride. If I met the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror I knew I would see his knowledge of what had been done to me to make me pregnant, euphemism or no, and he wouldn’t be able to help thinking about it himself. My husband took my hand in his and kissed it, and set it back down in my lap.

  “Why is your family paying for my doctor’s visits?”

  “Why, they want to!”

  “But you didn’t ask me, Rustom.”

  “What was there to ask? I want the best for you. You’ve been so sick.”

  “The doctor didn’t do anything to change that.”

  “Don’t be cross,” he said. “Today’s a good day.”

  We were curving along Marine Drive; it looked serene from the vantage of the car, the hard afternoon light softened by the whitish haze of the ocean. Seeing it through the window of a car was almost like seeing it through the screen of the cinema, or through the hazy generalities of a dream, midday there was not much traffic, and we moved quickly enough that the eye could not hunt out the particularities of trash and stink that were apparent both to a walking body or a face on the bus. This unnerved me. The city from the car was the beautiful city of the rich, who dulled their eyes by ignoring the city of the poor that the car’s vantage could not erase, the other city that rapped against the glass at the traffic lights: skinny girls always with a child balanced on their hip and wild, dirty hair and dirty threadbare dress walking calmly through traffic, always the girl with a baby on her hip and another bare-bottomed baby trailing behind, who needed no words to express their plight, only a hand lifted to an open mouth, I too turned my face away from them as they came to rap upon the glass. Would the doctor tell my in-laws what I had asked? Perhaps it would not serve him to give them such a report, lest they deem me unfit and decide to stop paying for my medical expenses. He had not, in any case, told my husband.

  At home, I was so fragile to my husband he practically wanted to carry me into the house. It’s true I was tired, I had a pleasant heaviness in my body that tugged me easily under the surface of a dream, in which I was back at the hospital where I had had my appointment, and the doctor offered me a deal: he could not remove the baby from my body, but he could ensure that it never grew any bigger, and that I would never give birth, it would stay in me always the size of a child’s thumb, the only concession I had to make was to feed it, I would have to insert my pointer finger, I would have to jam this finger hard into my lady’s part where the baby would lean down and suck my finger, drinking each day a few small drops of blood. “Shall I show you?” said the doctor, stretching out his hand. I woke before I could reply. It was dark and the flat was empty. I went to the bathroom and washed out the dank taste of my mouth. I was incredibly hungry, with a pure clean hunger I had not felt in weeks. Almost as soon as I switched on the lights my husband returned with hot pakoras greasy in newsprint, so fresh they burned my fingertips as I grasped them, and I ate them quickly saving none for my husband, conscious of nothing at all except the salt and oil I ate and the wash of spice against my mouth. When I was finished I looked at him and his eyes were on me. He was smiling. “Hungry?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t leave any for you.”

  “They were all for you.”

  “How long was I asleep?”

  “Three four hours. You must have been tired. You were snoring.”

  “I’ve been so hungry,” I said, sighing, I was still hungry, but would have to make food for myself if I wanted it, and I didn’t quite yet feel like moving.

  “Oh, I’d almost forgot.” And he brought a little newspaper wrapped bundle and placed it in my lap. Inside were the bitter, warty, green vegetables I had asked for days ago.

  “Karela!”

  “Yes. They’re good for you, aren’t they? I thought they’d balance out.”

  “How much did you pay for these?”

  “I won’t tell you,” he laughed.

  “How much? One rupee?”

  He shook his head.

  “More?”

  “Don’t send a man vegetable shopping.”

  “I’ll cut them,” I said. He gave me a knife and I sliced rounds into the newspaper. Inside, the flesh was turning yellow and the seeds were hard—the vegetable seller had known to pawn off his worst wares on this unsuspecting fish—but the raw smell was still so bitter my mouth began to water confusedly. “Ugh,” he said, “how can you stand it?”

  “After all, what’s more bitter than whiskey?” I said. “Here, you press.”

  He took his task seriously, and squeezed out the pale juice between his palms, catching it in a steel cup, which I immediately drank, undiluted by water. There was a slight salt taste that was, I think, the sweat of his palms. I licked his palm. It was an animal action my animal body did, and surprised us both. He had not been allowed near in weeks. His skin was smooth from the bitter green and hot under my tongue. He looked at me. Who didn’t want to be the object of such a gaze? Not I, but my body did. Now there was nothing left to lose it went dumb to my anger. What did it want? My husband put his damp hand on my breast I let him. It was yes my body said my legs opened. He was gentle at first and it hurt only a little. Too gentle my body wanted it to hurt a lot. It wanted to be thrust into so hard it tore open and the soul poured out. I gripped his shoulders. Both of us were still dressed. My body made some horrible grunting noise I gritted my teeth. Even through his pleasure he looked at me with a damp alarm. Should I stop? I didn’t say anything and he didn’t stop. My body thrust its animal hips up to meet him deeper where he knelt hot inside me. What it felt was not a sweet feeling, it was dirty-good, like scratching the scalp until it bleeds. Or: better. Or: worse. This time, he pulled himself out from my body’s socket before releasing his white-pearl-mucus against its thigh (as he had neglected to before), perhaps out of some primal superstition to protect the unborn child. Something released too inside my body and charged forth, starting from my core and flushing through my groin, a wild, hot, scary movement of blood that made me cry out with raw fear and sent soft needles through my limbs. I had never been so tired before. I pushed him up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To wash.”

  “Wait,” he said,
“don’t.” I think he wanted me this way: marked, smelling of him: his. So I let him lay with his head on my breast. Under his ear my heart slowed and my breath became more normal, though, slumped against the wall, I soon developed a cramp in the small of my back. I touched his hair. Down at the root his scalp was sweating, and there was one single white hair that sprung out against the black. “I’ve never been so happy,” he said. “And you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  It was the body I had always dreamed of inhabiting just like the doctor had warned. Though the nausea did not ebb, beside it grew a terrible hunger, one that seemed never able to be sated. I could deny myself nothing, my desire for food became pressing and singular until it was attained. Sweets: yogurt: milk: cream: milk: milk: milk, glass after glass, until I was sick. Not only my breasts grew—the nipples themselves grew and darkened almost to black—but my hips took on substance, and my thighs thickened and touched: my whole body was rushed with blood and with it a lust for itself, its own fertility and abundance, it wanted to spread and spread, to be rubbed with oil or ghee until it was polished to the apex of its dark shine. In my belly she was still no larger than an idea, and my belly revealed her not at all in her particulars, though all in all I was transformed, lush, suddenly, as a cinema star whose glittering face adorned the city’s colorful hoardings. A stranger might not have guessed my condition, unless he smelled its slight fecund stink. Alone in the cottage, I wound the ghungroos around my ankles. I had never spent as much time away from my work as these difficult weeks, and I felt even before I stood up that something had been eroded, in my feet and legs especially, in my body’s tautness. I asked my customary blessing from my guru and forgiveness from the floor, but when I straightened up to begin the simplest of movements I felt almost panic—had it all been lost? Years and years of work lost, just slid out the body? My body was so heavy, it wanted to move slowly as though through thick water. I thought: and then? My in-laws would not want a girl, but they would suffer one, if another child was promised, and then, if that one was not a boy, another. If it was not lost—and it was not, not yet, my feet, though heavy, remembered their rhythms, the spine its posture, the hands still bent—how long would it remain in my custody? It needed daily attention and care, it needed time to express itself through its long embroidered thoughts and phrases. And those soft, empty, evening moments, and a strong, free body.