Jasmine (7 page)

And then, after about three weeks, just as I was beginning to worry that Prakash was a phantom, a voice without a body, Hari-prar stumped into the hut whistling “I Love You,” my favorite song from
Mr. India,
and slipped three movie tickets into my fist. “I got first-class seats,” he boasted, shaking rain off his hair. “Nine p.m. showing tomorrow. But get ready early. You know how crazy the rickshaw wallas and the bidi wallas are for Sanjay Dutt.”

I toweled dry his wide spiky head. He had said nothing about Prakash, but I knew that if they had spent money on
a movie ticket for me, they meant for their friend to bump into me. I was a sister without dowry, but I didn’t have to be a sister without prospects.

That night the rain thickened into a downpour. I sat on Mataji’s sleeping mat and hugged her. We listened together to the rain soften the dirt in our courtyard. Mataji tented her quilt around me; it was her bridal quilt, the red cotton cover tattered, the stuffing thin and lumpy. I smelled mildew. Moonlight and monsoon dampness fought their way in through the small window. Ours was the only kaccha house on the lane to have a window. It wasn’t a real window, not like the big rectangles with glass and wrought-iron grilles in Vimla’s house; it was just a crude gap in the mud wall. But to my Lahori father it had been a “window,” because to live windowless was to live like an insect, he said, to give up. I couldn’t see the neem tree from where I sat, but I could smell its bitter clean leaves and the heady ammonia of fresh mud. Good things were about to happen. I would carry out Mataji’s forgotten mission.

The next dawn I let the maidservant’s little girl scavenge firewood and light the hearth and boil the milk. I didn’t want scratched arms, red eyes, and smoky hair. Effect must be calculated. I braided my hair three different ways. From my mother’s rusted-out trunk, I extracted one of her few Lahore saris, a pale peach silk embroidered all over with gold leaves. I added Pitaji’s dark glasses—I would put them on only when we got to the cinema house. At the last minute, I stuck a jasmine wreath in my hair.

I have no idea how I looked that night—the only mirror in our hut was a rearview rectangle that Arvind-prar had twisted off a UN jeep he’d found rusting in the demilitarized zone near the border—but I know how I felt. A goddess couldn’t have been surer. At the bottom of the mirror were some English words I didn’t exactly understand but took as a kind of mantra:

OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR

We rode Hari-prar’s scooter over sticky and rutted kaccha roads, Hari-prar steering and Arvind-prar holding a tarp over our heads to keep us from some of the rain. The roads closer to the bazaar were paved and slick. The scooter skidded only once, spilling Arvind-prar into a construction pit where an American-style “super bazaar” was being put up by Potatoes-babu with some money from Vancouver Singh. Arvind-prar’s khaki pants got khakier with mud. “Son of a pig!” he yelled at the pit. “Baboon!”

When we got to the movie theater, people were already massed outside the door, but Hari-prar decided we’d arrived too early and led us into a tea shop across the street. The tea shop had been a garage not long before, and still looked it. The owner had dropped out of the same technical college in Jullundhar as had my brothers, and at about the same time, so there was some backslapping to get through before we were seated at the best table, just out of the rain but with the fullest view of the sidewalk.

The owner was a conspicuously charming man, but his
wasn’t the voice that had seduced me weeks ago. I put on the dark glasses to look movie-starrish and scanned the tables for the man I was supposed to accidentally bump into. I didn’t come up with a single possibility.

“You are so kind to grace my humble shop.” The owner was at our table, ordering the small boys and old men who did the serving to bring cleaner glasses, hotter tea, spoons for the gulab jamuns. He paid me more compliments. “What, you are trying only one spoonful of my world-famous sweets? A pretty lady always has a delicate appetite?”

Our waiter, a stooped old man in khaki shorts that didn’t hide warty growths on one thigh, served me steaming tea in a cup with a saucer. Everyone else got tea in glasses. I read the sign: I was special. I was a pretty lady with delicate taste, not a dowryless fourteen-year-old. I poured a little tea into the saucer as I had seen Vimla do many times, and blew and sipped and blew some more.

The tea was barely warm enough to fog up the bottom rim of my sunglasses, and it was weak. I brewed better tea.

A bald man two tables away joked, “Kapoor sahib is trying hard to impress someone.”

I was meant to hear the joke. Did that mean that the man with the laugh in his voice had shown no interest at all? That this evening wasn’t planned for Prakash, whose last name I still didn’t know?

The owner bumped my shoulder, faking clumsiness, on his way back to the kitchen to scold the cook. “Pardon me, pardon me. I am an oaf!”

I stopped sipping. The tea had cooled enough for a patch of brownish skin to form in the middle of the cup. I did not want to spend my life with an oaf who had to fake an accident in order to touch me.

The moviegoers were now massed on the street and on both sidewalks. They fluted around vendors’ stalls and pressed into our tea shop. One man about Arvind-prar’s age walked past (a little too casually, I thought) and looked at me (again, a little too casually). I stared back. He walked back the way he had come, or tried to. The movie line’s swelling and rippling forced a stumble out of him. When I gasped (I hadn’t meant to), he swiveled back to smile at me. A thin lock of hair tumbled out of place, over one eye. He was not a tall man, and his mustache was neatly trimmed in a thin bar, like my brothers’. An impression was all I had: dignity, kindness, intelligence. Maybe even humor.

Why did I get the needy, ingratiating charmers and oafs instead?

Hari-prar checked his Seiko—a present from a customer whose smuggled Toyota he’d fixed—and asked for the check.

“You want to insult me? You think I’d charge you money when you have brought me however brief a presence of this lovely lady?”

We gathered our umbrellas and flashlights. The rest of the night seemed unstoppable and unbearable. Three
hours or more in soggy clothes in an over-air-conditioned hall, men copping feels in the chilly dark, mice scurrying under seats for warmth.

“Arvind!”

I clutched my flashlight.

“So, you
do
think she’s a temptress? You took so long we thought she’d failed the test!”

The stumbler floated toward me.

“What is your name?” He asked the question in English. He asked it in a very soft voice.

“Arré,” Arvind-prar objected. “You know her name already.”

But the voice kept welling over me. “Does she talk? What is your name?”

“Answer him!” Arvind-prar ordered. “She is all the time talking, we can hardly shut her up.”

“Shut up,” he said, not unkindly, in Punjabi. “She is blushing. She is a woman of fine sympathies, not like you blockheads. You
are
blushing. Are you afraid of me? There is time to talk. I saw you worry, back there, when I stumbled. It was instinctive, wasn’t it? Don’t talk. Don’t say a word. I want to be surprised when I hear your voice.”

12

T
WO
weeks later we were married. I wore Matajis red and gold wedding sari, which was only slightly damaged by mold, and in my hair the sweetest-smelling jasmines. Ours was a no-dowry, no-guests Registry Office wedding in a town a 250-rupee taxi ride south of Hasnapur. Vimla, who was engaged to the son of the Tractor King of our district (he imported Zetta tractors from Czechoslovakia and was supposed to have illegal bank accounts all over Europe), accused us of living in sin. I showed her our marriage certificate, but she shook her head. She said, “It isn’t for me to say anything like this, I know, and of course the papers nowadays are full of caste-no-bar-divorcees-welcome matrimonial ads, but it seems to me that once you let one tradition go, all the other traditions crumble.”

She and her fiancé were holding off their marriage till he was twenty, because of their horoscopes. “What is the sacrifice of a little bliss now for a guaranteed lifetime?” Just because you’re clever in school doesn’t mean you can ignore your fate in the stars, she reminded me. I’d already had my warning, which I succeeded in blocking (“Believe an old fool?” “What does he know? Ha!”) every time the memory of the banyan tree and the old man came over me in the night.

My husband, Prakash Vijh, was a modern man, a city man. He did trash some traditions, right from the beginning. For instance, in Jullundhar, instead of moving in with his uncle’s family, as the uncle had expected us to—Prakash had lost his parents in a cholera epidemic when he was ten—he rented a two-room apartment in a three-story building across the street from the technical college. His uncle fussed: “In the old days we had big houses and big families. Now nobody cares for old people,” and his aunt wept: “Your wife is so fancy that our place isn’t good enough for her?” The Prime Minister was destroying ancient values with her vasectomy program and giving out free uterine loops.

But Prakash remained impatient. “There’s no room in modern India for feudalism,” he declared.

For the uncle, love was control. Respect was obedience. For Prakash, love was letting go. Independence, self-reliance: I learned the litany by heart. But I felt suspended between worlds.

* * *

He wanted me to call him by his first name. “Only in feudal societies is the woman still a vassal,” he explained. “Hasnapur is feudal.” In Hasnapur wives used only pronouns to address their husbands. The first months, eager and obedient as I was, I still had a hard time calling him Prakash. I’d cough to get his attention, or start with “Are you listening?” Every time I coughed he’d say, “Do I hear a crow trying human speech?” Prakash. I had to practice and practice (in the bathroom, in the tarped-over corner of the verandah which was our kitchen) so I could say the name without gagging and blushing in front of his friends. He liked to show me off. His friends were like him: disrupters and rebuilders, idealists.

Pygmalion
wasn’t a play I’d seen or read then, but I realize now how much of Professor Higgins there was in my husband. He wanted to break down the Jyoti I’d been in Hasnapur and make me a new kind of city woman. To break off the past, he gave me a new name: Jasmine. He said, “You are small and sweet and heady, my Jasmine. You’ll quicken the whole world with your perfume.”

Jyoti, Jasmine: I shuttled between identities.

We had our arguments. “We aren’t going to
spawn
! We aren’t ignorant peasants!” Prakash yelled every time I told him that I wanted to get pregnant. I was past fifteen, and girls in the village, and my mother, were beginning to talk. He said he was too poor to start a family and I was too young. My kind of feudal compliance was what still kept India an unhealthy and backward nation. It was up to the
women to resist, because men were generally too greedy and too stupid to recognize their own best interests. I didn’t dare confess that I felt eclipsed by the Mazbi maid’s daughter, who had been married off at eleven, just after me, and already had had a miscarriage.

“Just because you’re a good engineering student you think you know everything,” I fought back. “You think that hi-tech solves every problem. What does hi-tech say about a woman’s need to be a mother?”

He said, “It says you are still very young and foolish. It says you are confusing social and religious duty with instinct. I honor the instinct, and there is nothing more inevitable than a fourteen-year-old married woman becoming a mother.” But he didn’t put real venom into it. And he didn’t hit me—he never hit me.

Instead, he’d ask, “What’s ten divided by two?”

“Five. You think I’ve forgotten how to count?”

“And what’s ten divided by ten?”

“One. I’m not dumb.”

“And which number is larger, five or one?”

There was no winning these arguments. He’d read more than I had. He had statistics for everything. He’d done more thinking than I had; he was twenty-four and I was fifteen, a village fifteen, ready to be led. He was an engineer, not just of electricity, he said, but of all the machinery in the world, seen and unseen. It all ran by rules, if we just understood them. The important thing, he said, was to keep arguing, fight him if I didn’t agree. We shouldn’t do anything if we didn’t both agree.

So we didn’t start a family. My poor, good-hearted
husband! I think now that he was afraid of hurting me, afraid of embarrassing me with any desire or demand. “Jasmine, Jasmine,” he would whisper in the anguished intimacy of our little room, “help me be a better person.”

And I did. I bit him and nibbled him and pressed his head against my bosom.

Prakash left the apartment before five-thirty in the morning six days a week and didn’t get home before eight or nine in the evening. He worked two jobs, one as a repairman and bookkeeper for Jagtiani and Son Electrical Goods, and the other as a math tutor to a dreamy boy of thirteen. Then he crammed for his diploma exams. I missed him, but I didn’t feel abandoned. Abandonment meant deliberate withdrawal; his was absence. He had to pay rent, buy expensive technical books, save so we could start our family. He was a shameless saver.

I found things to do all day without trying. For instance, there was a Ladies’ Group raffle in our building and I was asked to take over its running. And then Parminder in flat 2B said that since I had no in-laws and no infants to harass me all day, why didn’t I go with her on her door-to-door detergent-selling routes in three neighborhood buildings and she would cut me in. The commission I kept secret from Prakash. He was a modern man. Still, I wasn’t sure how he would react to my having my own kitty.

* * *

Sundays were our days together. Mr. Jagtiani couldn’t buy Prakash on Sundays, not even with promises of off-the-record double overtime. Mr. Jagtiani, like Potatoes-babu and other traders, did some of his business in black money that didn’t appear in the books and some in taxable white. Prakash hated having to keep the books for Mr. Jagtiani. “I’m an inventor,” he grumbled, “I shouldn’t have to lie and cheat and be that louse’s accomplice!” Prakash grumbled, I consoled. We were content.