Arranged Marriage: Stories (17 page)

The pallet was in the nursery because there had been a problem with sleeping arrangements. The wife had asked that the aunt sleep in the nursery with the little girl, while the maid slept on the floor of the sister’s bedroom (for what reason the sister thought better not to ask). But from the second night on, the little girl had refused, insisting that the sister sleep with her instead.

“She snores,” she said, pointing to the old woman. “And she smells too.”

The aunt, bristling, had said that the wife had asked her specifically to sleep in the nursery, and no one was going to stop her from carrying out the poor sick woman’s wishes.

They’d reached a compromise by having the sister join the other two in the nursery, but when she’d asked if the maid could sleep there too, the aunt had put her foot down quite firmly. The room was too small, and besides, she wasn’t going to sleep in the same space as a servant girl, especially one with
questionable morals. (After the mother had shown up, there had been lengthy and heated discussions about the maid’s morals throughout the house, though not in the wife’s hearing. In the dining room the aunt had held forth on how it was a scandal that a decent family should be asked to put up with a woman who was, by her own admission, no better than a call girl. And in the kitchen a vindicated
ayah
had told everyone how she knew, just
knew
, right from the first that the girl was
evil.)

So the maid slept, as before, in the storeroom. And she was probably better off there, thought the sister, sighing, as for the tenth time she pushed the little girl’s foot off her stomach and clamped a pillow over her ear to block out the aunt’s vigorous snores.

The sister had never been a heavy sleeper. And now, what with the new sleeping arrangements and worry over the wife’s health and that of her unborn child, she spent long stretches of the night lying awake. Staring at the walls streaked with moonlight, she thought of her last visit to the hospital. How the wife had lain in the narrow military-green cot she was confined to at all times by the doctor’s orders, her face leached of animation, pale as old ivory. How in spite of the open windows her room had smelled faintly of urine (for she wasn’t allowed to get up to go to the bathroom) and another odor the sister couldn’t quite place but thought of as the smell of helplessness.

Lying awake, the sister grew familiar with the night noises of house and garden, t
he jhi-jhi
insects chirping in the
honeysuckle, the owls hooting mournfully from the distant
ata
tree, the geckos calling
tik-tik-tik
as they slithered over the whitewashed corridor walls. The watchman’s shoes clattered on the cobbles outside the gate as he patrolled the streets with his baton, raising his voice periodically in the cautionary
kaun hai
. The dripping faucet in the bathroom sounded as though someone were impatiently tapping his fingers along a table; the door frames creaked and settled with the noise of knuckles being cracked; and the halting
shhk-shhk
of the ceiling fan was disturbingly like a person shuffling along in bedroom slippers.

But on this night in the beginning of the second week the sister heard a different sound, one that made her sit up in bed with a hand pressed against her pounding chest. It was a very soft padding, as of naked feet on marbled mosaic, coming down the corridor. What frightened the sister was the fact that it was the sound of someone trying to be quiet.

She looked down at the sleeping child beside her, the old woman breathing loudly with her mouth open. She wanted to lie down again, to plunge, like them, into an uncomplicated rest. But she couldn’t. She slipped off the mattress cautiously, in spite of the voice in her head that cried
no, no, no
. She pulled her sari tight across her chest, unlatched the bedroom door, and looked out through the crack.

A man was disappearing around the bend of the corridor. She didn’t recognize him. Only a little moonlight seeped into the passage, and he was dressed in the sleeveless
genji
and white
dhoti
that most Bengali men wear on hot nights. Could it be one of the servants? Did the maid have a “friend”
after all? The sister followed, keeping to the shadows, though she knew that she shouldn’t.
Unwise, dangerous
, screamed the voice in her head.
What does it matter who he is?
But something about the man drew her on. When she stopped at the corner to peer into the gloom, she saw that he was knocking on the door of the storeroom, muffled, urgent beats that the sister could barely hear above the thudding of her heart.

“Who is it?” she heard the maid call, her tone wary. “Who is it?”

The man—she couldn’t see his face yet—whispered something the sister couldn’t catch, but she heard the latch click open. The maid appeared in the doorway, face swollen with sleep, hair and clothes disarranged. “Khuku’s ill? Where is she? What’s wrong? I’d better go help Choto-didi right away. …” And then more loudly, as the man tried to push her back into the storeroom, “No, I beg you, no, stop it, let me go, please. How can you be like this with Didi sick in the hospital?”

“Don’t act so virtuous,” the man hissed. “Once a whore, always a whore.”

The sister recognized the voice. Dizziness swept through her—or was it terror, mixed with rage on her sister’s behalf—and she had to hold on to the edge of the wall.

The man tried to clamp a hand over the maid’s mouth but she twisted away. “Don’t worry, no one will know. I’ll make it worth your while,” he said with a laugh that struck the sister like a shard of ice. “And it’ll be a lot more fun with me than it was with those stinking peasants at the
bustee.”

“Let me go, Dadababu.” The maid was kicking at the
man’s shins now. When the man didn’t release her, she clawed at his face, her voice rising threateningly. “Or else I’ll scream loud enough to wake everyone in the house.”

The man swore, low and vicious, clapping a hand to his cheek. He shoved the maid backward, and the sister heard her body thudding against the wall. “Bitch! You’ll be sorry.”

The sister caught a glimpse of her brother-in-law’s rage-engorged face. And then she was running faster than she ever had in her life to get back to the bedroom before he saw her.

For years afterward, she would ask herself why she’d felt so ashamed, so guilty, as though
she
had been the clandestine one. She would wish that she’d stayed and confronted him, if only with a look. She would wonder if that might have made a difference to what happened later.

The next day the sister sat with a late-morning cup of tea on the balcony, thinking. The idea of facing her brother-in-law’s polite inquiries at the breakfast table—
Is everything all right, Did you sleep well, Is there anything I can get you on my way back from the office
—had filled her with nausea, and she had stayed in bed, complaining of a headache, until he left home. Now as she listened to the maid reading aloud to the little girl, her voice rising and falling melodiously, with no trace of the night’s turbulences in it, she wondered what she should do. Should she indicate to her that she knew what had happened and try, together, to figure out a plan so that it didn’t occur again? Should she approach her brother-in-law with her dangerous knowledge and blackmail him into good behavior? Should she tell her sister? She remembered the wife’s face,
white against the white hospital pillow, her eyes that passed without curiosity over people’s faces, as though they were part of a distant past which no longer held meaning for her—and knew she couldn’t. Nor could she undertake the other actions—she was not the type. Youngest in the household and a girl besides, she’d always had people making decisions for her, or at least telling her what to do, praising her for being tractable and obedient, which as everyone knew were the cardinal virtues of womanhood. The thought of acting on her own, of setting in motion some uncontrollable force that might eventually shatter her sister’s marriage (for she wasn’t tractable, her sister, not like her—who knew what she might take it in her head to do if she found out what had happened?) filled her with dread.

And besides, she told herself, staring down at the dappled sunlight playing over the red and gold dahlias that edged the driveway, perhaps she was overreacting. These things happened—even in her sheltered provincial existence she’d heard of them often enough. At least her brother-in-law didn’t have a “keep,” a mistress set up in a separate household, as affluent Bengali men often did. He didn’t go off with his friends for “musical” weekends which featured, as everyone knew, singers and dancers who were happy to provide other services as well. In his way he loved his wife and was a good father to his little girl. Perhaps the best thing would be to forget what had happened, to forgive him his moment’s lapse (he was a man, after all, with those uncontrollable male urges she’d been warned of time and again). To pray it wouldn’t recur.

“Choto-didi! Choto-didi!”

Startled, the sister looked down to see the
darwan’s
daughter, who lived in the servant’s quarter by the gate, running toward the house, panting.

“Choto-didi, there’s a crowd of people at the gate, along with that one’s mother.” (Here she jerked her chin at the maid, who had let the book fall to the floor.) “They’re trying to get in. My father’s still at the office with the car, and the bearer’s gone to the market. What shall we do?”

Now the sister—she’d been too deep in thought earlier—could hear the rattling of the locked gate, the angry yells that grew louder even as she listened, and then a clanging, as of rocks being thrown. Soon they’d break the lock and be on them.

The sister stood up, her whole body trembling. She had to do something—and soon. But what? She tried to think of what her sister would have done—not the woman who now lay in the hospital as though at the bottom of a lake, with all that stagnant water pressing down on her, but her vibrant earlier self. She closed her eyes to remember the wife’s strong, sweet voice, the confident grace of her gestures, and when she opened them she told the
darwan’s
daughter to fetch the
mali
and the cook.

“Take Khuku to her room,” she said to the maid, “and stay there, no matter what.”

The maid stared at her as though she hadn’t understood.

“Go!” snapped the sister, suddenly furious with her, and the maid moved away, holding the little girl’s hand. There was something odd about her walk, but the sister, rushing to call the police, couldn’t tell what it was. Years later, as she watched a film about migrating birds, it would strike her that
the maid had moved with the stiff gait of lost seabirds that find themselves in a landlocked field far from home.

The sister felt a little better after she had reached the police.

“They’ll be here right away,” she told the anxiously waiting
mali
and cook. “Now you come with me to the gate.”

The cook twisted the dishcloth hanging from his shoulder. “Don’t you think we should just stay in the house, Choto-didi, with the doors and windows locked? Don’t you think you should call Dadababu?” Oily drops of sweat beaded his upper lip and the sister realized that he too had never faced anything like this before. Curiously, it made some of her fear dissipate.

“No,” she said, answering his first question. (She wasn’t ready to deal with the second, which really meant
why haven’t you called him.)
“We must show them we’re not afraid.
Now
. Once they break in we won’t be able to control them, but if we act right away we still can.” She was surprised at how calm she sounded, how logical, as though she really believed in what she was saying.

The three of them made their way to the gate, and when they were there the sister saw that the massive iron sheets were dented by rocks and the wrought-iron carvings of spears hung bent in unnatural shapes, like broken arms and legs. She looked at the faces on the other side, seeing them piecemeal—the rotted, tobacco-stained teeth, the flared nostrils, the corners of mouths turned down in hate so strong that she could smell it as clearly as their sweat. The eyes glazed with the euphoria of destruction. They weren’t people,
real
people. Try as she might, she couldn’t put their fragmented features
together to form an entire human face. The cold, quicksilver terror flooded her veins again, making her voice shake as she asked what they wanted, and from their wolfish grins she could see that they too sensed its presence.

“We want the girl. Give us the girl.”

“Her mother wants her back, and so does her man. You got no right to keep her.”

“Up to no good we hear, you folks. Taking advantage of a young girl like that.”

“All you rich people, all alike, think you own the earth.”

Clumps of onlookers had gathered at the edges of the mob by now, street vendors and sweepers, passersby on their way to work, servants from some of the neighboring houses. The sister searched their faces for support but found only elation at the prospect of drama, the rich folks finally getting what they deserve. She bit down on the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood, salty, metallic. The throbbing pain took away some of her fear.

“No one’s keeping Sarala against her wishes. She doesn’t want to go back to her mother, or her”—with a mental apology to the maid, she forced herself to say the word—”husband.”

“Sarala! Is that what she’s calling herself nowadays!”

“What’s this about her not wanting? Everyone knows a daughter belongs to her parents, a wife to her husband.
Sahibi
talk like this is what’s making our families fall apart.”

“Look, miss, you better not stick your finger in what isn’t your business. We got no quarrel with you. Just call the girl to the gate. We’ll take her and be off.”

“Shall I go get her?” whispered the cook.

The wife’s face floated into the sister’s vision. It was the palest yellow, as though, having been underwater a long time, it had taken on the color of lake sand. Strands of uncombed hair tangled around it like water weeds. The eyes were closed, in death or resignation.