Arranged Marriage: Stories (26 page)

“Well then, why don’t you take the next train to Calcutta. Stay with your mother until you figure things out—maybe she can put some pressure on your in-laws….”

“It’s not so simple.” And now Runu sounds scared again. “I called Mother just before I called you. She says it’s not right that I should leave my husband’s home. My place is with them, for better or worse. She’s afraid they’ll never take me back if I move out, and then what would happen to me? People will think they threw me out because I did something bad. They’ll think my baby’s a bastard….” Her voice breaks on the last word.

The walls of my bedroom seem to undulate, then close in on me. Pratima-auntie is one of the gentlest and most affectionate women I know. I’ve always thought of her as my second mother. “Did you tell her they’re determined to make you go through with the abortion?”

“I did. She thinks it’s the lesser of the two evils. Anju, what shall I
do?”

I take a deep breath. As I talk, I press my palm tight against my belly, drawing warmth from my baby. Drawing strength.

After I hang up, I sit hunched over on the edge of the
bed. I feel old and drained and sick to my stomach. I hope by God I’ve given Runu the right advice.

“What are you going to do now?” says Sunil from the doorway. I can see displeasure in the tight press of his lips.

“I’m going to the bathroom to throw up,” I tell him. “And then I’m going to make”—I hold his eyes, daring him to protest—“another call to India.”

Later in bed Sunil says, “I don’t think you should have told Runu to go to your mother’s house.”

I bolt upright, pushing off the covers. “Why not? What was the poor girl supposed to do? Let her in-laws force her into an abortion she didn’t want? Besides, my mother didn’t mind. Why do
you
have such a problem with it?” My tone is deliberately aggressive. I want—I need—to attack someone.

Sunil refuses to be baited. “What could your mother say?” His voice is infuriatingly reasonable. “You told her that Runu was on her way. Besides, you were already so worked up, she probably didn’t want to upset you further. …”

“Worked up.
Worked up!
You’d be worked up too if people were trying to kill—no, murder—your baby niece.”

Sunil ignores the interruption. “But have you thought of what’s going to happen to Runu now? How’s she going to live? Your aunt barely has enough money to pay her own expenses.”

“Runu can get a job.”

“Doing what? She has no training, no experience.”

“She could …” I think furiously. “She could supply the local boutiques with needlework. Or
salwaar-kameez
outfits. She’s real good at sewing. …”

Sunil gives me an ironic look. “You really believe it’s that easy, don’t you?”

“Not easy, perhaps, but certainly possible.”

“Even if that’s true, what about the social stigma? Just like her mother said, there’ll be a lot of gossip.”

“There’s always gossip. You have to ignore it.”

“That’s easy for you to say from here. Runu’s the one who’ll have to face it every day. Even if money isn’t a problem, what kind of life will it be for her? She certainly won’t have the chance to remarry. She’ll be alone with her daughter the rest of her life, a social pariah, someone the neighbors point a finger at every time she walks down the street.”

I open my mouth to protest hotly, then shut it. I’m remembering the pictures we used to draw when we were little, Runu and I, about what we wanted to be when we grew up. Mine would change from week to week—a jungle explorer, a scientist, a parachute jumper—but hers were always the same. They showed a stick-figure woman in a traditional red bordered sari with a big bunch of keys tied to the
palloo
. She wore a red marriage
bindi
and a big smile and stood next to a mustachioed man dressed in a suit and carrying a briefcase. Several stick-figure children (their sex indicated by boxy short pants or triangular skirts) would be gathered around them, arms linked, dancing. Had I taken all of that away from her by my misplaced American notions of feminism and justice? For a moment a terrible doubt rises in me like nausea, threatening to spill out.

“Maybe her mother wasn’t so wrong after all,” Sunil says. “Maybe the abortion
is
the lesser of the two evils.”

I stare at my husband. At the dark, heavy shapes of the
words he has released into the air between us. It strikes me I know far less about this man than I had naively, romantically, believed.

“Why don’t you say Runu’s mother-in-law’s right too. And Ramesh,” I finally whisper. “Why don’t you say you agree with him? Maybe
you’d
have wanted me to have an abortion if my baby hadn’t turned out to be a boy.”

“Anju!” Sunil’s voice quivers with indignation.

I avoid his eyes and snatch up my pillows. “I’m going to sleep on the family-room couch,” I say. What I’ve said is probably irrational, even unforgivable, but I’m in it too deep now to back away. I slam the door behind me for good measure.

I throw my pillows onto the lumpy couch and wipe my damp, shaking palms on my nightdress. I open the refrigerator and eye a large frozen pepperoni pizza. I’m tempted to pop it into the microwave oven and eat the whole thing, every last soggy forkful. I imagine newspaper headlines which read,
Pregnant woman, driven to despair by cruel husband, ends up in hospital due to pizza overdose
. That would serve Sunil right.

Instead I settle for a glass of hot milk and honey, and after I’ve drunk it, I try to make, myself comfortable on the couch. But questions riddle me. It feels like when I have pins-and-needles in my legs, except now it’s all over my body. Does Sunil love
me
, or only the mother-to-be of his son? Would he have cared for me as much if we had been in India and the baby had turned out to be a girl? What if I hadn’t been able to have a baby at all? Would he be asking his parents to look for another wife for him? Pregnant-woman fancies, perhaps, but I can’t stop them from coming. And Runu, who must be almost
halfway to Calcutta by now. How is she feeling as she watches, from her train window, the thatched porches of village huts where women cook their husbands’ lunches over wood fires while their children play around them? Will she look back on this day and curse me?

I close my aching eyes.
Please
, I pray,
please just let me sleep

Then the memory comes to me, so intense that I can feel once again the cold slimy jelly rubbed onto my skin, the monitor sliding back and forth over the mound of my belly as the doctor prepares for the ultrasound that will let me see the baby for the first time. At first he is a vague dark shape on the screen. Then as the image is enlarged I see the delicate curl of his perfect fishbone spine, the small bump of his sex. He waves his arms and legs in a graceful underwater dance, though as yet I don’t feel any of it. The green radium blip on the screen, not unlike the stars Runu and I used to watch on those long ago summer nights, is the beat of his fierce heart.

That ultrasound had changed everything, made my baby, my Anand, real in a way that nothing else had.

I know it must have been the same for Runu.

I feel better about my decision. I still can’t say, for sure, that I gave Runu the right advice. Even with decisions you make for yourself, it takes years to know. But my body begins to relax. Soften. I take a deep breath and put my hand over my belly, and feel, for the first time, a small but definite movement.

Maybe Runu can come to the U.S. with her daughter, I think. Maybe she can five close by in a little apartment and sew clothes for all the Indian ladies. She can sell chutneys and
sweets and
samosas
—maybe even open her own restaurant. I can see our children growing up together, as close as their mothers were, Anand and—I give my niece a name—
Dayita
, beloved, for so she will be to us.

Anand and Dayita, I whisper aloud. Anand and Dayita. It sounds beautiful, complete, like a line from a
ghazal
.

Tomorrow I’ll ask Sunil about sponsoring Runu, maybe getting her a student visa. I know he’ll fight it at first, give me a hundred reasons why we can’t do it. Why we shouldn’t. But I’ll fight back. Already I’m learning how. I’ll use what I have to—my pregnancy, even. It’s worth it—for Runu and, yes, myself. I’ll get my way.

I
know I will
, I say to myself, and smiling, I drift into sleep.

AFFAIR

I
WAS IN THE KITCHEN CHOPPING VEGETABLES FOR DINNER
when I found out about it. From Ashok. During a commercial break on TV in the middle of the football game he was watching.

“You know, of course,” he said, raising himself elegantly up on one elbow from his favorite position on the couch so he could watch my face, “that Meena is having an affair?”

Just like that.

The knife slipped and nicked my finger. I watched the blood appear as though from nowhere, dyeing the meticulously sliced carrots a deeper orange. I felt like throwing something at Ashok, the bowl of green
lauki
squash I’d picked up at the Indian grocery, maybe. Or maybe even the cutting board, arcing through the air and smacking that smile off his face.

But I didn’t. I merely held up the bleeding finger and
said, in the mild, reasonable tone I’d perfected over eight years of marriage, “Now look what you made me do. I really wish you wouldn’t spring things on me like this.”

“Poor Abha.” The look of sympathy on Ashok’s face was so real that even I, who knew better, was almost fooled. Ashok’s good at that. “Want me to kiss your finger and make it better?”

“No, thank you,” I snapped, reaching in the drawer for a Band-Aid.

“How was I to know she hadn’t told you? She
is
your best friend, after all,” said Ashok. And then, “You’re mad, aren’t you, that she told
me
instead of you?” Triumph gleamed in his eyes.

He was right, and he knew it. But I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of acknowledgment, so I remained silent.

Until today I’d thought I knew all about Meena’s life, just as she knew about mine. We talked to each other every day—on the phone if we couldn’t get together in person. She’d called me just an hour earlier, before our husbands returned from work, so we could “really talk, without the guys interrupting us.” She’d told me about the office, how the new ad campaign she’d thought up had already increased their sales. And about the cutest little jacket she’d picked up at Nordstrom’s, with a real fox-fur collar. She hadn’t said a thing about an affair.

Feeling betrayed, I busied myself with chopping onions so I’d have a valid reason for tears.

“I bet you’re dying to know who he is.” Ashok’s voice sparkled with malicious mischief. “I’ll tell you if you ask me very nicely.”

He would have, too. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It would have meant defeat.

Angrily I dumped a couple of extra teaspoons of red pepper powder into the chicken curry. Hot food gives Ashok the most terrible heartburn. Usually I wouldn’t have stooped to such an obvious revenge, but right now I was too agitated to be subtle.

Then a thought struck me. I went over and stood in front of Ashok.

“Is this a joke? Is this some kind of a sick practical joke?”

“Would I do such a thing?” Ashok was all wounded innocence. “Especially when I know how fond you are of Meena?”

“I remember the time you pretended you got laid off from work. …”

Ashok flashed me a charming smile that was also a challenge. “Why don’t you ask Meena yourself at Kuldeep’s party tomorrow?” He pressed the volume-increase button on the remote control.

“If this is a joke, you’re going to be really sorry,” I shouted over the blare of the TV.

Ashok blew me a lazy kiss. He loves it when he manages to get under my skin. He recrossed his legs in one liquid motion, aimed the remote, and flipped through shows (another habit of his that drives me crazy) until he found MTV, a channel I particularly dislike.

I retreated to the kitchen with its shiny rows of canisters, its racks of spices all carefully labeled, its gleaming tiles and faucets that usually made me feel sane and in control. But I couldn’t escape the TV, where a very young, very blond
woman in a shimmery skintight outfit was sultrily singing about
how you make me feel each night
. I averted my eyes from the slow undulation of her hips, the pointy-red tip of her tongue moistening her lips. Her painted fingernails moving suggestively over her breasts. I knew Ashok was watching me, a mocking curl to his lips that seemed to say,
Still suffering from your prudish Indian upbringing, Abha?
But I couldn’t help it. Sex for me was a matter between married people, carried out in the silent privacy of their bedroom and resulting, hopefully, in babies. I preferred not to think of its other aspects, and I resented American TV for invading my home with them.

I stared down at the translucent curls of the onions waiting on the cutting board. They formed an intricate pattern against the dark wood, glistening like shavings of mother-of-pearl. If I could read them, as people did tea leaves, what would it tell me about Meena? About Ashok and myself and our constant sparring? It was a depressing thought. I threw another spoon of red pepper powder into the chicken for good measure and, leaving the rest of the dinner uncooked, locked myself in the spare bedroom upstairs.