The Two Krishnas (33 page)

When Rahul finally tiptoed in, it was already the darkest part of the night. He lay down lightly beside her and put a hand on her arm as they both pretended to sleep. But this time, she didn’t respond, keeping still, letting his hand stay there, and not knowing what to do because her mind was already thinking of the times when he might no longer be there.

* * *

Room to room she went, clutching a risible variation of chai tea purchased out of sheer nervousness from the coffee shop. An imbalanced, cloying blend of black tea, Indian spices and milk, she hated to think that this was what most Americans thought of as the ritualistic elixir Indians found indispensable to their lives.

Pooja saw no one who resembled a young Indian boy there, only yards of books in a store swaying to a jazz soundtrack and tranquilly empty at that time of morning. She seemed to recall that Elton’s was the same shop from which Rahul had bought her the gargantuan cook book that she had wanted for her birthday and this thought, instead of cheering her up, only made her feel more depressed. Had this boy sold the book to Rahul? Is that when they first met? Who started it?

She thought of asking someone for him. Maybe it was his day off and he wasn’t there. Or maybe he was working in the back somewhere and they would just call him out. But maybe he didn’t even exist and the salesperson would look at her strangely and she could put this whole fiasco behind her. But what if he did? What would she say? Would she have the courage to ask him if he knew her husband?

She finished surveying the last of the three creatively organized wings, then crossed the sunlit courtyard to go in and out of rooms crowded with books, and there was still no sign of this boy. She began to feel increasingly ridiculous for letting Sonali compel her to such indignity. She didn’t want to inquire about him, finding the entire thing preposterous. So, knowing well enough that just a cursory inspection of the shop neither proved nor dispelled his existence, she felt grateful to God for having been spared. Pooja felt the sudden urge to buy Rahul something—a new tie, the Crabtree & Evelyn lavender shower gel that he liked to use, a leather portfolio, something—as if this would somehow compensate for mistrusting him.

As she was preparing to leave the Hemingway wing, housing mostly literary fiction, Pooja was approached by a bizarre-looking young American girl dressed entirely in black and covered with tattoos, who asked if she could be of assistance.
Didn’t this poor girl have any parents,
Pooja wondered,
someone who could tell her how ridiculous she looked, teach her how to dress?

“Oh, yes, actually, I’m looking for someone. Do you happen to know—,” but then suddenly she clamped up. “Well, you know what, it’s okay. Thank you so much, I will just look around.”

The salesgirl shrugged, handed her a bookmark promoting some new novel and left. Pooja turned around and had barely begun to walk away when she heard the girl’s voice: “Atif, hon, I’m
sooo
starving! Can I just take my lunch now, if you don’t mind?”

She stopped dead in her tracks. She heard his voice, deep and sonorous: “Yeah, yeah, no problem. Actually, you know what, are you going to Vons? Can you pick me up a sandwich, too?”

Pooja turned around very slowly. Standing across the room from her, behind a glass-topped counter, was an Indian boy, plucking out bills from his leather wallet, ordering lunch. He handed the money over to the girl and she left the room with the same bored expression.

That’s when their eyes met and they froze, a current passing between them.

There are moments, Pooja knew, in which the agency of words came after intuition, when a simple glance was able to convey the whole soul of a person. This was how they looked at each other. The way in which the boy’s expression suddenly changed, the smile overshadowed by deep remorse, his eyes downcast, told Pooja that he recognized who she was.

And when Atif saw her anguished face, her world turned upside down, the picture he had seen in Rahul’s wallet came alive. He knew too, that he had, in this naked moment, confirmed everything that Pooja Kapoor needed to know about them.

* * *

Pooja fled from the bookstore, tears blinding her eyes. She would never be able to recall getting to the parked car or driving away from the bookstore. Her heart was thumping so violently that she thought it might explode in her ribcage.
Dear God, what did I do to cause this? Where did I fail him? How did I drive him away? What has come over him?
Her mind swarmed with images of the boy’s face, that regretful look on it, of Rahul and him kissing, their mouths gnashed against one another’s, erasing her completely from existence. At one point, she even failed to notice that the traffic lights had changed, and it wasn’t until an irate driver behind her honked furiously that she was startled out of her feelings. When he drove up next to her, he rolled down his window and barked expletives but she kept her eyes on the road, the pain inside her too huge to be affected by anything in her surroundings.

Upon reaching home, she was thankful that Ajay wouldn’t be there to witness her state of mind. How would she explain this to their son? What could she say? She needed time to sort this out on her own before she could face anyone. Ashamed of how she must look, she tried to slink past the gardener, who stopped the lawnmower to greet her, perhaps expecting that she would attempt a conversation about the flowers in her broken Spanish as she normally did. This time, however, she only gave a curt wave as she disappeared into the house. Once she had locked the world outside, she sank into the sofa where only the day before she had received the blow from Sonali. What she wouldn’t give now to reverse that day, to have avoided that woman altogether and not have heard any of it.

At first, she did everything she could to keep from breaking down, coaxing herself to explore the idea further, to ignore intuition for once and seek some tangibility instead. So what if the boy had looked at her strangely? That proved nothing! After all, she had also stood in the middle of the store and looked at him just the same. How was he supposed to look back at some strange Indian woman looking at him accusingly? How could she doubt the man she had loved her whole life based on a single look exchanged between two complete strangers? How could she question her whole marriage because of someone like Sonali anyway?

But then, tossed around by her thoughts, finding solace in neither direction, Pooja treaded into murkier waters. Had he done this sort of thing before? Then how come she couldn’t remember him behaving strangely? Why hadn’t she noticed it? Didn’t such men act a certain way? Is this why he never wanted to touch her? Had he always been—wanted to be—with other men?

She walked into the kitchen and leaned against the sink, afraid that she would throw up from the vivid images of Rahul and the boy churning in her mind. She drew the curtain to the window above the sink facing out to Sonali’s house, trying to calm down but, now that she had seen the boy’s face, it became impossible and a murderous rage gripped her so that all she could think of was how she wanted the boy gone.

What kind of a woman am I?
she recriminated, burying her tear-stained face in her hands.
Dear Lord, what have I done to drive him to this? All this must be my fault. I’ve carefully built this sanitary life without sex, throwing myself into your worship, always craving Rahul but contending with just his platonic company. And now I’ve driven him away, to another man.
This thought, suddenly absurd, made her burst into laughter, the whole situation feeling like it was happening to somebody else. The weight, just momentarily, lifted. But then, just as quickly, she saw them together again in a car, kissing, and her laughter morphed into a sharp cry. If only she could talk to someone, someone who could steer her straight, tell her how to think, help her to get a handle on the thoughts running amok with her.

Brashly, she considered calling her mother, suddenly growing excited at the possibility of being able to unburden herself, but then she quickly realized the folly of such action.
Do I really want them to know this? Is there still a chance I could be wrong?
She could have just waited for Rahul to come home at the end of the day to confront him, but panic seized her. With each passing moment that she hadn’t reached Rahul, she felt he was mutating into a stranger. So Pooja called the bank where Rahul’s talkative assistant Amelia greeted her. Amelia launched excitedly into a conversation about when they would be seeing her next as Pooja tried desperately to get connected to him. “Please,” she said, “I really need to speak to Rahul.”

“And you know that dessert you sent that last time?” Amelia carried on. “Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God! It was so good! I don’t want to sound greedy but you know what? Do you think you could send some more? You know, the really creamy, sweet—”

“Please! I need to speak to him now!”

“Oh, okay,” Amelia said, deflated. “But Mrs. Kapoor, he isn’t here right now. I can tell him you called or you can try him on the cell—”

Pooja felt as if the whole world would come to an end in a matter of seconds. She must talk to him right away. But where could he be? With the boy? She realized that she had just come from the bookstore so the boy must still be there. Rahul was probably out on a business call. But then she wondered if there could be others, other men, and she felt as if she was going to pass out. She practically hung up on Amelia and tried Rahul immediately on his cellular, but the call went directly to his voice mail, not even ringing once, and she hung up, sliding against the wall to the ground, disheartened, silenced.

If Pooja had felt lonely before, now she felt like she was the only person on the planet, as if, were she to walk out onto the street, she would find not another soul. She wandered in a daze to the little altar in the kitchen and prostrated herself at the feet of Radha and Krishna, wishing this was all just a bad dream that she would awaken from, or that she could escape into some parallel universe where life was being lived as she had known it in her ignorance.

In that moment, when her imploring eyes looked up at the benevolent faces of the divine couple, blissfully plaited together in a love that had inspired thousands of poems and ecstatic ragas, another scrim dropped and Pooja’s stomach lurched. She confronted, as if for the very first time, the irrefutable fact that the deities to whom she had prayed for the preservation of her marriage were themselves unfaithful, philanderers married to other people—Radha to the King of Mewar, Krishna to Rukmini.

Day after day, and in the moment of her crisis, she had petitioned a couple who had disregarded their vows and turned forbidden passion into a criterion for nothing less than perfect love.

* * *

At first Rahul had laughed with disbelief, thinking Atif was playing a prank, but as he had provided more details—about five eight, the deep purple
salwar kameez
, the thick mane of black hair swept over to one shoulder, the large expressive eyes, the undeniably beautiful face—Pooja materialized in his mind. And then there were the three missed calls from her on his cell phone and Amelia’s miffed message about her calling and sounding upset.

When Rahul walked into their home, he knew just from the way that Pooja stole her eyes from him even as she laid out the chai on the table, and from the heaviness that hung in the air like a thousand muffled screams, that the truth had been unleashed upon her.

“You’re home,” she said simply, not a trace of joy in her voice. After more than two decades of being married, should one expect excitement when a husband comes home early from work? But then that was just Pooja, thought Rahul. And after all the years that she had nurtured the same zeal, he had finally stolen it from her.

In that very moment, along with the pain that invaded him, came also a curious relief that he hadn’t anticipated, as if a heavy burden had been lifted. Now he could stop hiding. He quietly took his seat at the head of the table.

“How was the office?” she asked, still busying herself with arranging the table, her voice noticeably stroked by a tremor. She flitted in and out of the kitchen for little things. Then Rahul saw it, a decorative bookmark from Elton’s that had slipped under the table and was lying just a few feet away from where he was sitting. He bent down, picked it up.

He didn’t answer her, finding the response pointless now, and she didn’t persist, letting the stillness hang in the air, an answer in itself. He knew where the conversation needed to go, away from the niceties. He felt his body shaking involuntarily from anticipation, a man unable to tear his eyes away from the spectacle of his own disaster. Beads of perspiration covered his forehead even though the room was pleasantly cool. He wished that she would, at least this once, abandon her decorum, unleash the agony in her heart. At that moment, he was prepared to deal with anything but her composure and the infinite suspension of their showdown.

Pooja had just laid a plate of fragrant, freshly fried potato fritters next to his chai, when he reached out behind him and clasped her by the wrist to keep her from disappearing into the kitchen.

Careful, careful
, she urged herself.
Control yourself. Otherwise your heart may leap out of your body through your mouth in a shattering wail. Better just keep moving for a while. Don’t stop. Move. Move.

She struggled, not with the coyness of when he once caught her desirously but with the terror of confrontation, and twisting her wrist free from his grasp, her gold bangles chiming, she fled to the kitchen. Leaning her face against the refrigerator, she felt the steel cool her forehead as tears filtered through her lashes. Shame unlike any she had experienced assailed her and she wished that the earth would swallow her up: anything to keep from confronting him. Humiliation choked her so that she could say nothing and tears rolled down her cheeks but strangely, even as her heart heaved with pain, this humiliation seemed to exacerbate her passion for him.