Arranged Marriage: Stories (13 page)

Only sometimes, once in a while, I take a day off from work. I go back to Mrs. Ortiz’s neighborhood—nobody knows this—and drive through all the streets, slowly, carefully, peering at passing faces. I hike up into the eucalyptus and scrub oak, the dead bark crumbling under my feet like sloughed-off snakeskin, the thorny branches catching in my clothes, and call a name until the shadows congeal deep and cold around
me. And when I come back to my apartment, I close my eyes before the last bend of the stairs that lead to my door. I hold my breath and imagine a boy in a red Mickey Mouse T-shirt sitting on the topmost step.
If I can count to twenty, thirty, forty, without letting go
, I say to myself,
he’ll be there. He’ll hold out his arms, and in his high, clear voice he’ll call to me
. I stand there halfway up the darkening staircase feeling the emptiness swirl around me, my lungs burning, my eyes shut tight as though in prayer.

THE MAID
SERVANT’S
STORY

T
HE AFTERNOON SUN LIGHTS UP THE SOFT FOLDS OF
Deepa Mashi’s red-and-white sari as she sits back with a satisfied after-lunch sigh in her cushioned easy chair. It shines on her hair, which is still as glossy and black as in my childhood, when I loved running my fingers through it. The
ghu-ghu
birds are cooing in the calm shadows under the eaves of her house, and in the distance I can hear the faint cry of the
kulfi
vendor calling out
fresh fresh ices, sweet sweet ices
. For a moment it is as though I had never left Calcutta.

Then Mashi says, “So, Manisha, I hear you might be getting married soon.”

I am not surprised by the comment. I’ve been anticipating something of the sort ever since I mentioned to my mother, with careful casualness, that I’d met a Bengali professor at the university in California where I taught English. Still, disappointment rises raw and bitter in my throat. I’d hoped
that things would be different between my mother and myself this time.

I told her about Bijoy the very first night of my visit home. We were alone in her small flat overlooking a park filled with
kadam
trees that sent their too-sweet fragrance into the dark, moist air. We served ourselves from the dishes the day maid had cooked before she left. Rice,
dal
, a plain cauliflower curry. My mother lives simply. Strains of Rabindra Sangeet from a neighboring radio floated on the still evening
—Ami chini go chini tomare, I know you well, woman from a distant land beyond the ocean
. It was a good time, I felt, to talk—if not as mother and daughter, at least as two intelligent, adult women.

But when I’d spoken she just glanced up sharply with a look that could have been suspicion or disapproval, or even relief that a prospect had appeared, at last, on my barren marital horizon. I never have been able to read my mothers expressions. “That must be very nice, dear,” she said. Then she went back to describing the naming ceremony for my cousin Sheela’s oldest son in Burdwan last year.

Deepa Mashi is waiting. So I force a laugh and raise my hands in exaggerated protest, feeling myself slip back into the habits of my childhood, hiding pain with humor. “Mashi! I’ve just started seeing Bijoy! No one’s said anything about a wedding yet.”

Mashi opens her silver
paan
case, carefully chooses a rolled-up betel leaf, and places it in her mouth. “Two months since you met him, no?”

When, I wonder—as I used to throughout my growing
up years—did the sisters manage to get together to discuss their errant daughter-niece? My resentment is all for my mother—it is she who should be asking these questions, not my aunt, much as I love her.

“You know for how long I met your uncle before we were married?” Deepa Mashi continues.

Of course I know. She’s told me of it a hundred times. But I also know how much pleasure the retelling will give her. So I offer her a fond, expectant smile.

“Fifteen minutes during the bride-viewing, that’s how long!” Mashi speaks with the plump and breathless exuberance she brings to all her stories. “And last year, grace of God, we celebrated our twentieth anniversary.” She shuts her
paan
case with a victorious snap, as if she’s won a major argument.

I take refuge in platitude. “Times have changed, Mashi.”

Mashi waves away the intervening decades with a be-ringed, dimpled hand. “Oh, you Americanized girls! The really important things never change.”

Perhaps she’s right. I’d come back from my three years abroad feeling adult and sophisticated, determined to match my mother’s distant courtesy. Over and over on the flight to Dum Dum airport, I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t offer up my life for her inspection and approval, as I had so many times before. Yet I’d done it almost immediately. I guess transformations—the really important ones—require more than time and distance, and even desire.

That first night back, smarting at Mother’s seeming indifference, I’d forced my way into her description of the
guests at the naming ceremony. “Bijoy teaches psychology—it’s quite unusual to find Indians in that field, at least in California.”

I was angry with myself as soon as I blurted it out, callow as any adolescent yearning for parental love—even before I heard her responding, in the perfectly modulated voice which I remembered so well, that he must be a most interesting man. I felt the familiar, furious urge to say something brutal enough to shatter her self-possession.
You’re right, Mother, he’s very interesting—especially in bed
. But I swallowed them both, the anger and the words. What good would it do? What good had
anything
done?

Throughout high school I’d pushed myself to stand first in exams, to win debates and drama competitions; but I never got the praise I craved, that squeezed-breathless, delirious-with-joy hug that other mothers gave their daughters for far lesser achievements. For a while in college I’d tried the opposite, cutting classes and running around with a wild crowd, smoking cigarettes (an absolute taboo for an Indian girl of good family) and even
ganja
a couple of times, letting boys hold my hand in broad daylight in the Maidan park, where it was certain someone would see us and report the facts back to my mother. But all she did was look at me with a distant sadness, as one might regard a character in a book or movie, and say that she didn’t understand why I’d want to ruin my life this way. When, in my final attempt to shock some kind of feeling out of her, I’d told her that I was leaving for America, she’d merely said, “Be careful, and write if you need anything.” At the airport she’d pressed a cool, dry cheek to mine (while all around us parents clung to departing children and
let fall torrents of tears) and said, “You know I want the best for you.”

The worst part was, I knew she did. She watched over my life carefully, vigilantly, if from afar. All through my childhood, everything I wanted—everything material, that is—was provided for me, often before I needed to ask. But what
she
thought, what
she
longed for, what made her cry out in her dreams (for I’d heard her, once or twice), I never knew. It was as though she’d built a wall of ice around her, thin and invisible and unbreakable. No matter how often I flung myself against it, I was refused entry.

Maybe she no longer knew how to let me. Maybe people were right when they said that the death of her husband and baby in a cholera epidemic that had struck Calcutta overnight when I was about five had killed a part of her too. (Why had that explanation always seemed too facile for me?) At any rate, she’d relinquished me to Deepa Mashi who, herself childless, enthusiastically took on the role of second mother, commending and cajoling and consoling me all those years, asking embarrassing questions and, when I refused to answer, creating vociferous scenes dramatic enough to satisfy any teenager’s need for attention. Other girls might have resented the interference, but I was grateful. When I felt myself dissolving before my mother’s even, passionless gaze, Deepa Mashi’s voice, laughing at my follies, scolding me for my misdeeds, gave me solidity and shape. Secretly, guiltily, I wished I could have been her real daughter.

“We should plan your wedding outfit,” Mashi is saying now. “Who knows when you’ll come visit us next. And weddings have a habit of happening suddenly.”

I want to explain to her about Bijoy. He’s not like other Indians—certainly not the ones Aunt would know, engineers and accountants with responsible gold-rimmed eyeglasses and Parker fountain pens in their breast pockets—upright, virtuous, and deadly boring. On our second date he’d told me that he found me attractive and was interested in getting together, but wasn’t ready to be tied down by marriage. I’d felt angry, insulted—far more so than if an American man had said the same thing. I’d taken the bus home that night, after informing him in chilled tones that we’d better not see each other again.

And we hadn’t for a month, during which I thought incessantly, obsessively, of him. His utter disregard for the rules of my youth—and surely his as well—fascinated me. At the end of the month I contrived to get myself invited to a party where I knew he’d be present. I accepted his offer to escort me home. I let him kiss me, and when his lips pressed down hard on mine, his tongue forcing its way into my mouth, his hands deftly insistent on my
kurta
buttons, I told myself it was what I wanted. A liberated relationship, no strings attached. A sailing into uncharted and amazing areas of experience that someone like my mother couldn’t even imagine. I’d pushed back the feeling of shame, the old voices echoing in my head,
Men don’t do these things to women they respect
.

But it will only distress Mashi if I tell her I’m living with a man I’m not—and might never be—married to. Her world is constructed of simpler lines, its shapes filled in with bright primary colors that do not bleed together, as in the calendars of gods that hang on the walls of her living room. So it is much easier, as I sit under the slow-revolving ceiling fan, lulled by
the sun-warm smell of jasmine and gardenia from the garden, by the
shhh shhh
sound of the
mali
watering the lawn, to let myself fall into her fantasy.

“I’ll wear a Benarasi silk, I guess, except I don’t want any of those traditional gaudy colors.” A part of me is amused at my own emphatic tone, as though this might actually happen. “You know, orange and maroon, eggplant-purple, bloodred.” I realize I am thinking of my mother’s wedding sari. I came across it once, wrapped in a blanket and thrust into the bottom of a trunk, like a sordid secret. “You can’t ever wear them later, especially in America.” I am pleased at the cleverness with which I’ve let drop the fact—which will duly find its way to my mother—that I’m not intending to come back to India. Not to stay. “Maybe saffron would be nice—a pale saffron. Yes, that’s it. I want a saffron Benarasi for the wedding.”

Mashi is silent for a long moment. Then in a strangely quiet voice she says, “Oh, my dear, not saffron, not that.”

“Why not?” I ask, surprised by her uncharacteristic seriousness.

“Saffron is such a sorrowful color.”

“Funny you should say that. I always thought of it as rather festive—the color of beginnings.”

“I guess you’re right. It’s just that it reminds me of …” Deepa Mashi’s voice disappears into a sigh.

“Of what, Mashi?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing, it’s only a story,” says Mashi, twisting her fingers together. “A sad story, a bad-luck tale, not meant for brides-to-be. Come, let me make you some cardamom tea—I remember how much you used to enjoy that.”

But like most Indian women, Mashi is not good at saying no. So when, intrigued by the uneasiness in her voice, I insist, she tells me.

Once there was a young wife, the apple of her husband’s eye. She was beautiful and charming and intelligent, and had been to college as well, a rare achievement for women in those days. Her husband was fond of bringing up this fact in the course of conversations with friends—especially as she didn’t flaunt her education and deferred, in most instances, to his superior judgment.

The young wife, whom everyone considered a lucky woman, lived in an old and respected part of Calcutta in a marble mansion that had belonged to the family since the time of the grandfather. (The grandfather, whose portrait hung, majestically framed in antique brass, in the hall, had been famous for his charitable works—free medical clinics and slum schools—another fact that the husband liked to mention in conversations though he was not involved in any of them.) While the husband was away at work (he was an assistant manager at a very proper British bank that had stayed on in India after Independence), she occupied herself with household duties, as a wife should, telling the cook which of the master’s favorite dishes to prepare for dinner, and supervising the maids as they dusted the tall armoires and wall clocks and polished the ivory and brass figurines that sat in various alcoves around the house. She took long walks in the garden and advised the
mali
on what to plant in the flower beds that edged the circular driveway. And when the
darwan
(who doubled as chauffeur) stood up with a smart salute from his stool at the wrought-iron gates which were kept closed at all times, she wished him good day with a smile and asked after his wife and children, who lived in the servant’s quarters above the garage and whose names she always remembered.