Arranged Marriage: Stories (3 page)

“Ei, Sumita! Mita! Are you deaf?” Radha says. “This is the third time I’ve asked you the same question.”

“Look at her, already dreaming about her husband, and she hasn’t even seen him yet!” Deepali jokes. Then she adds, the envy in her voice only half hidden, “Who cares about
friends from a little Indian village when you’re about to go live in America?”

I want to deny it, to say that I will always love them and all the things we did together through my growing-up years—visiting the
charak
fair where we always ate too many sweets, raiding the neighbors guava tree summer afternoons while the grown-ups slept, telling fairy tales while we braided each others hair in elaborate patterns we’d invented.
And she married the handsome prince who took her to his kingdom beyond the seven seas
. But already the activities of our girlhood seem to be far in my past, the colors leached out of them, like old sepia photographs.

His name is Somesh Sen, the man who is coming to our house with his parents today and who will be my husband “if I’m lucky enough to be chosen,” as my aunt says. He is coming all the way from California. Father showed it to me yesterday, on the metal globe that sits on his desk, a chunky pink wedge on the side of a multicolored slab marked
Untd. Sts. of America
. I touched it and felt the excitement leap all the way up my arm like an electric shock. Then it died away, leaving only a beaten-metal coldness against my fingertips.

For the first time it occurred to me that if things worked out the way everyone was hoping, I’d be going halfway around the world to live with a man I hadn’t even met. Would I ever see my parents again?
Don’t send me so far away
, I wanted to cry, but of course I didn’t. It would be ungrateful. Father had worked so hard to find this match for me. Besides, wasn’t it every woman’s destiny, as Mother was always telling me, to leave the known for the unknown? She had done it, and her
mother before her.
A married woman belongs to her husband, her in-laws
. Hot seeds of tears pricked my eyelids at the unfairness of it.

“Mita Moni, little jewel,” Father said, calling me by my childhood name. He put out his hand as though he wanted to touch my face, then let it fall to his side. “He’s a good man. Comes from a fine family. He will be kind to you.” He was silent for a while. Finally he said, “Come, let me show you the special sari I bought in Calcutta for you to wear at the bride-viewing.”

“Are you nervous?” Radha asks as she wraps my hair in a soft cotton towel. Her parents are also trying to arrange a marriage for her. So far three families have come to see her, but no one has chosen her because her skin-color is considered too dark. “Isn’t it terrible, not knowing what’s going to happen?”

I nod because I don’t want to disagree, don’t want to make her feel bad by saying that sometimes it’s worse when you know what’s coming, like I do. I knew it as soon as Father unlocked his mahogany
almirah
and took out the sari.

It was the most expensive sari I had ever seen, and surely the most beautiful. Its body was a pale pink, like the dawn sky over the women’s lake. The color of transition. Embroidered all over it were tiny stars made out of real gold
zari
thread.

“Here, hold it,” said Father.

The sari was unexpectedly heavy in my hands, silk-slippery, a sari to walk carefully in. A sari that could change one’s life. I stood there holding it, wanting to weep. I knew that
when I wore it, it would hang in perfect pleats to my feet and shimmer in the light of the evening lamps. It would dazzle Somesh and his parents and they would choose me to be his bride.

When the plane takes off, I try to stay calm, to take deep, slow breaths like Father does when he practices yoga. But my hands clench themselves on to the folds of my sari and when I force them open, after the
fasten seat belt
and
no smoking
signs have blinked off, I see they have left damp blotches on the delicate crushed fabric.

We had some arguments about this sari. I wanted a blue one for the journey, because blue is the color of possibility, the color of the sky through which I would be traveling. But Mother said there must be red in it because red is the color of luck for married women. Finally, Father found one to satisfy us both: midnight-blue with a thin red border the same color as the marriage mark I’m wearing on my forehead.

It is hard for me to think of myself as a married woman. I whisper my new name to myself, Mrs. Sumita Sen, but the syllables rustle uneasily in my mouth like a stiff satin that’s never been worn.

Somesh had to leave for America just a week after the wedding. He had to get back to the store, he explained to me. He had promised his partner. The store. It seems more real to me than Somesh—perhaps because I know more about it. It was what we had mostly talked about the night after the wedding, the first night we were together alone. It stayed open
twenty-four hours, yes, all night, every night, not like the Indian stores which closed at dinnertime and sometimes in the hottest part of the afternoon. That’s why his partner needed him back.

The store was called
7-Eleven
. I thought it a strange name, exotic, risky. All the stores I knew were piously named after gods and goddesses—
Ganesh Sweet House, Lakshmi Vastralaya for Fine Saris
—to bring
the
owners luck.

The store sold all kinds of amazing things—apple juice in cardboard cartons that never leaked; American bread that came in cellophane packages, already cut up; canisters of potato chips, each large grainy flake curved exactly like the next. The large refrigerator with see-through glass doors held beer and wine, which Somesh said were the most popular items.

“That’s where the money comes from, especially in the neighborhood where our store is,” said Somesh, smiling at the shocked look on my face. (The only places I knew of that sold alcohol were the village toddy shops, “dark, stinking dens of vice,” Father called them.) “A lot of Americans drink, you know. It’s a part of their culture, not considered immoral, like it is here. And really, there’s nothing wrong with it.” He touched my lips lightly with his finger. “When you come to California, I’ll get you some sweet white wine and you’ll see how good it makes you feel….” Now his fingers were stroking my cheeks, my throat, moving downward. I closed my eyes and tried not to jerk away because after all it was my wifely duty.

“It helps if you can think about something else,” my friend Madhavi had said when she warned me about what
most husbands demanded on the very first night. Two years married, she already had one child and was pregnant with a second one.

I tried to think of the women’s lake, the dark cloudy green of the
shapla
leaves that float on the water, but his lips were hot against my skin, his fingers fumbling with buttons, pulling at the cotton night-sari I wore. I couldn’t breathe.

“Bite hard on your tongue,” Madhavi had advised. “The pain will keep your mind off what’s going on down there.”

But when I bit down, it hurt so much that I cried out. I couldn’t help it although I was ashamed. Somesh lifted his head. I don’t know what he saw on my face, but he stopped right away. “Shhh,” he said, although I had made myself silent already. “It’s OK, we’ll wait until you feel like it.” I tried to apologize but he smiled it away and started telling me some more about the store.

And that’s how it was the rest of the week until he left. We would lie side by side on the big white bridal pillow I had embroidered with a pair of doves for married harmony, and Somesh would describe how the store’s front windows were decorated with a flashing neon Dewar’s sign and a lighted Budweiser waterfall
this big
. I would watch his hands moving excitedly through the dim air of the bedroom and think that Father had been right, he was a good man, my husband, a kind, patient man. And so handsome, too, I would add, stealing a quick look at the strong curve of his jaw, feeling luckier than I had any right to be.

The night before he left, Somesh confessed that the store wasn’t making much money yet. “I’m not worried, I’m sure it soon will,” he added, his fingers pleating the edge of
my sari. “But I just don’t want to give you the wrong impression, don’t want you to be disappointed.”

In the half dark I could see he had turned toward me. His face, with two vertical lines between the brows, looked young, apprehensive, in need of protection. I’d never seen that on a man’s face before. Something rose in me like a wave.

“It’s all right,” I said, as though to a child, and pulled his head down to my breast. His hair smelled faintly of the American cigarettes he smoked. “I won’t be disappointed. I’ll help you.” And a sudden happiness filled me.

That night I dreamed I was at the store. Soft American music floated in the background as I moved between shelves stocked high with brightly colored cans and elegant-necked bottles, turning their labels carefully to the front, polishing them until they shone.

Now, sitting inside this metal shell that is hurtling through emptiness, I try to remember other things about my husband: how gentle his hands had been, and his lips, surprisingly soft, like a woman’s. How I’ve longed for them through those drawn-out nights while I waited for my visa to arrive. He will be standing at the customs gate, and when I reach him, he will lower his face to mine. We will kiss in front of everyone, not caring, like Americans, then pull back, look each other in the eye, and smile.

But suddenly, as I am thinking this, I realize I cannot recall Somesh’s face. I try and try until my head hurts, but I can only visualize the black air swirling outside the plane, too thin for breathing. My own breath grows ragged with panic as I think of it and my mouth fills with sour fluid the way it does just before I throw up.

I grope for something to hold on to, something beautiful and talismanic from my old life. And then I remember. Some-where down under me, low in the belly of the plane, inside my new brown case which is stacked in the dark with a hundred others, are my saris. Thick Kanjeepuram silks in solid purples and golden yellows, the thin hand-woven cottons of the Bengal countryside, green as a young banana plant, gray as the women’s lake on a monsoon morning. Already I can feel my shoulders loosening up, my breath steadying. My wedding Benarasi, flame-orange, with a wide
palloo
of gold-embroidered dancing peacocks. Fold upon fold of Dhakais so fine they can be pulled through a ring. Into each fold my mother has tucked a small sachet of sandalwood powder to protect the saris from the unknown insects of America. Little silk sachets, made from
her
old saris—I can smell their calm fragrance as I watch the American air hostess wheeling the dinner cart toward my seat. It is the smell of my mother’s hands.

I know then that everything will be all right. And when the air hostess bends her curly golden head to ask me what I would like to eat, I understand every word in spite of her strange accent and answer her without stumbling even once over the unfamiliar English phrases.

Late at night I stand in front of our bedroom mirror trying on the clothes Somesh has bought for me and smuggled in past his parents. I model each one for him, walking back and forth, clasping my hands behind my head, lips pouted, left hip thrust out just like the models on TV, while he whispers applause. I’m breathless with suppressed laughter (Father and Mother
Sen must not hear us) and my cheeks are hot with the delicious excitement of conspiracy. We’ve stuffed a towel at the bottom of the door so no light will shine through.

I’m wearing a pair of jeans now, marveling at the curves of my hips and thighs, which have always been hidden under the flowing lines of my saris. I love the color, the same pale blue as the
nayantara
flowers that grow in my parents’ garden. The solid comforting weight. The jeans come with a close-fitting T-shirt which outlines my breasts.

I scold Somesh to hide my embarrassed pleasure. He shouldn’t have been so extravagant. We can’t afford it. He just smiles.

The T-shirt is sunrise-orange—the color, I decide, of joy, of my new American life. Across its middle, in large black letters, is written
Great America
. I was sure the letters referred to the country, but Somesh told me it is the name of an amusement park, a place where people go to have fun. I think it a wonderful concept, novel. Above the letters is the picture of a train. Only it’s not a train, Somesh tells me, it’s a roller coaster. He tries to explain how it moves, the insane speed, the dizzy ground falling away, then gives up. “I’ll take you there, Mita sweetheart,” he says, “as soon as we move into our own place.”

That’s our dream (mine more than his, I suspect)—moving out of this two-room apartment where it seems to me if we all breathed in at once, there would be no air left. Where I must cover my head with the edge of my Japan nylon sari (my expensive Indian ones are to be saved for special occasions—trips to the temple, Bengali New Year) and serve tea to the old women that come to visit Mother Sen, where like a good
Indian wife I must never address my husband by his name. Where even in our bed we kiss guiltily, uneasily, listening for the giveaway creak of springs. Sometimes I laugh to myself, thinking how ironic it is that after all my fears about America, my life has turned out to be no different from Deepali’s or Radha’s. But at other times I feel caught in a world where everything is frozen in place, like a scene inside a glass paper-weight. It is a world so small that if I were to stretch out my arms, I would touch its cold unyielding edges. I stand inside this glass world, watching helplessly as America rushes by, wanting to scream. Then I’m ashamed. Mita, I tell myself, you’re growing westernized. Back home you’d never have felt this way.

We must be patient. I know that. Tactful, loving children. That is the Indian way. “I’m their life,” Somesh tells me as we lie beside each other, lazy from lovemaking. He’s not boasting, merely stating a fact. “They’ve always been there when I needed them. I could never abandon them at some old people’s home.” For a moment I feel rage. You’re constantly thinking of them, I want to scream. But what about me? Then I remember my own parents, Mother’s hands cool on my sweat-drenched body through nights of fever, Father teaching me to read, his finger moving along the crisp black angles of the alphabet, transforming them magically into things I knew, water, dog, mango tree. I beat back my unreasonable desire and nod agreement.