Arranged Marriage: Stories (27 page)

I threw myself down on the neatly made guest bed, across the scratchy Jodhpuri bedspread embroidered with good-luck lotuses which had been part of my trousseau, and cried for a while. But crying has always seemed to me to be a waste of time. All it does is make my face puff up. So I stopped and wiped my face on the edge of my sari and checked my reflection in the mirror. I looked every bit as
terrible as I’d expected—swollen eyes, red nose, sallow skin. There were red crisscross marks on my forehead where I’d pressed it against the bedspread.

Even under the best of circumstances I am no beauty. If my horoscope hadn’t matched Ashok’s so perfectly that everyone declared our marriage must have been ordained by the gods, I doubt that his family would have chosen me. I don’t have Meena’s fair skin, so dramatic with her curly black hair and long lashes. My nose is broad and honest but by no means elegant, while hers, straight and chisel-sharp, looks as though it belonged on an
apsara
from classical Indian sculpture. I constantly battle the inches that accumulate almost by magic around my hips (I put on a pound every time I
look
at dessert), while Meena glides through life slim and svelte, eating whatever she wants and wearing designer bikinis. “You could look really pretty, Abha,” she laments periodically, “but you don’t even
try.”
She’s shown me how to pull in my stomach and push back my shoulders when I walk, but I invariably forget. And when I’m forced by necessity to venture into the mall, I always pick up clothing with bright flowery patterns instead of the dark solids and narrow stripes she’s advised me to wear.

“It’s important for
you
to dress right because you’re in marketing and have to impress clients,” I told her once. “Me, I just do freelance work from home, writing recipes for the Indian papers. Why do I need to look good?”

“Really, Abha!” Meena had shaken her head like there was no hope for me.
“All
women need to look good. Don’t you want Ashok’s heartbeat to speed up when he looks at you?”

The thought of it made me laugh out loud. Really,
sometimes Meena’s ideas were so adolescent I remembered my mother, who’d spent most of her life in the simple red-bordered cotton saris most Bengali mothers wore, dabbing at her plump face with its
palloo
as she hurried from kitchen to nursery to dining room. I doubted that she’d
ever
made my father’s heartbeat speed up (though of course he loved her)—at least not in the last thirty years that I’d known them.

“You’re starting to sound like an American, Meena! Indian marriages aren’t based on such superficial things.”

“That’s what you think! Watch out—by the time you realize I’m right, it might be too late.” Meena’s tone had been joking. Still, it had reminded me how, a few evenings earlier, Ashok had looked up from a magazine he’d been reading and said, quite out of the blue, “Abha, I wish you’d do something to your hair, go get a perm maybe.”

Right now, though, I had more serious problems to worry about than my looks.

I do my best thinking when I write things down, so I reached under the bed. Safe behind the suitcases we haven’t pulled out in years I hide a notepad and pen for occasions like this. On the lined yellow sheet I wrote:

I. Why is Meena having an affair (if she is having one)?

I left some space below that, then added:

II. How wrong is what she is doing (if she is doing it)?

I left some more space (although I already knew the answer to this one:
very very wrong)
and went on to the third question.

III. Should I confront her about it?

There was another question. Needle-sharp, it pricked at
my eyelids when I closed them. But I wasn’t ready to write it down.

Downstairs the doorbell rang. Who could it be so late at night? I parted the bedroom blinds and peered out. There was a Domino’s Pizza van outside, its blue-and-red lighted sign twinkling festively. Damn! Ashok had outsmarted me again.

“Mmmm, sausage and mushrooms!” he was saying, his voice raised for my benefit. “Smells great!”

My stomach growled. Sausage and mushrooms are my favorite pizza toppings. But even the extra-hot chicken sitting uneaten in the kitchen would have tasted pretty good to me at this point. I’d started, halfheartedly, on another one of my diets this morning, and I hadn’t eaten anything since a spartan lunch of iceberg lettuce with no dressing. But of course I couldn’t go downstairs, where Ashok was lying in wait. So I gritted my teeth and went back to question one.

Why? Why? Why?
I wrote.
Was she bored? Did she want to shake up Srikant? Make him sit up and stop taking her for granted? Or had she found someone she couldn’t resist?

But what kind of man would be worth giving up your principles for? What kind of man would be more important than being a good wife?

I liked Srikant, Meena’s husband. He wasn’t handsome and suave and clever like Ashok, but from observing him over the years I felt he had a good heart. Living with Ashok has made me particularly appreciative of good-hearted people.

Srikant wasn’t a big talker. When he and Meena came over for dinner, he’d sit back and listen to Meena and Ashok
laughing at each others wickedly witty jokes, commenting on people and books and TV shows I didn’t even know existed. Sometimes from the kitchen, while I fried the
samosas I’d
made from scratch, or put the finishing touches on a particularly fine
qurma
, I would notice a wistful look flit over Srikant’s face. I wondered if he was thinking, as he watched their animated gestures, how well they suited each other. Others thought so too. When we went out together, Meena and Ashok entering a restaurant ahead of us with their long-legged stride, his hand possessively on her elbow, waiters often took them to be a couple. They probably made the same error about Srikant and myself, darker, shorter, quieter, hurrying to catch up, and too traditional to even touch hands.

When Srikant did have something to say, it was usually about his work. I guess he felt about it like I did about my cooking. As he described the latest software product he was developing, his voice would go deep and his eyes would shine. Forgetting awkwardness, he would sketch forms in the air with eloquent hands, and for a moment he would be almost handsome.

Then Meena would break in, laughing.

“I swear, that computer’s like his second wife—no, his mistress! He spends more time with it than with me. Do you know that he’s even given it a name?”

Srikant would smile shamefacedly.

“Lalita! He actually calls it Lalita!” Meena’s laugh would be high and brittle.

Srikant would look down, examining his square, blunt nails.

“I used to be dreadfully jealous when we were first married. Srikant would stay on at work till all kinds of hours, even though I kept telling him I hated being alone in the house. It was so deathly quiet, not like India, where something’s always going on—street vendors, servants, people dropping in to gossip….”

“How horrible that must have been,” Ashok would interject, his voice low and sympathetic as it never was when
I
complained about something, sending an ache through me.

I’d want to come to Srikant’s defense.
It’s what all of us Indian wives went through
, I’d want to tell Meena.
Why, Ashok still does the same thing
. But already she would be telling us about all the things she’d tried to get Srikant to come home early.

“I even bought a Betty Crocker cookbook and fixed him special dinners—stroganoff and soufflés and lime pies. Me! Can you imagine!”

We would all laugh because, unlike me, Meena is a terrible cook. She and Srikant virtually live on fast food and Chinese takeout.

“That’s probably what drove him into Lalita’s arms,” Ashok would quip.

“Probably. Anyway, my cooking efforts didn’t last long, and after a while I got used to being on my own….”

“And now no doubt you’ve discovered that there are advantages to your husband not being around.”

“No! What could they be?” Meena would ask in her most ingenuous voice, fluttering her lashes.

“Remind me to tell you sometime when Srikant and
Abha aren’t around,” Ashok would say with a wink. And the two of them would burst into laughter, with Srikant and me joining in just a few seconds late.

That’s how they always kidded around. Until today, I’d never let it bother me, because I was Meena’s special friend, her only confidante. She might joke with Ashok, flirt even. She might be the life of the parties we attended—the best amateur stand-up comic, as one of our friends (a man, naturally) said. But it was me she turned to when she was unhappy.

I knew things about Meena that no one else did—how she still turned on the TV evenings when Srikant was late coming back so she wouldn’t have to listen to the silence, how she slept with the light on when he went out of town. I was the one who held her and tried to calm her when, after her miscarriage last year, the doctor said that something was wrong with her uterus and she might never be able to have a baby. When her tears dampened the shoulder of my sari, I too had wept. That was another bond that held us close, the unspoken sorrow of being childless.

That’s why I couldn’t be resentful of Meena, not even when Ashok compared our looks. That’s why I forgave her her slicing wit, even if, once in a while, she turned it on me. She needed me more than anyone in my life ever had—the way I’d hoped, when I’d got married, my husband and babies might.

But not anymore, I thought as I pressed my nails into my aching temples. Now she had a man to share her most intimate joys and fears with, and she had Ashok to tell it all to.

My usually pristine kitchen was a mess. Half-cooked food, unwashed dishes, vegetable peelings in the sink—and now crusts of pizza lying in an open Domino’s box. I could feel the Parmesan cheese under my feet, sticky and coarse as sand. Thank God, at least, that Ashok had gone to bed. I couldn’t have faced his taunting smile on top of everything else.

I considered leaving everything the way it was, but I knew I’d just have to deal with it in the morning. So I mopped the floor and washed up and took out the trash and boiled some rice for myself. It was 2
A.M.
when I sat down to eat my rice and extra-peppery chicken.

I couldn’t remember the last time I was up so late. I like my sleep. Usually Ashok is the night person. If there’s a party that’s going to run into the small hours, we either drive separately or—we’ve started doing this more and more—he goes alone. I’m quite happy at home by myself, listening to one of my classical music tapes—a night raga by Chaurasia, maybe, the haunting notes of his flute hanging over me as I work on next week’s recipe for
The Indian Courier
. And when I go to bed I fall asleep immediately. I’m lucky in that, I guess. Meena now—she’s a real insomniac, especially if she’s upset. A little thing—her boss making a negative comment about her performance, or a letter from her mother about her sister’s new baby—can keep her up all night. She told me once that when she’s awake late she can hear the house breathing—a hushed panting, like a crouched beast’s.

I listened as I sat there at the kitchen table, my mouth burning from the chicken, my diet ruined, but I didn’t hear a thing except the refrigerator’s hum. Still, it was eerie, all that
silence, like black snow falling around me. On an impulse I turned on the TV.

I’m not much of a TV person. I watch a couple of cooking programs each week, and news on the days when I’m feeling socially responsible. And on weekend mornings, for a taste of home, I turn on the international channel where they show song-and-dance scenes from popular Hindi movies, though even those are getting bad, with the young girls in skimpy skirts and low-cut blouses, letting the men touch them here and there. I can’t seem to relate to the regular American shows, the ones Ashok watches. The people on TV—the men with their hair cut in the latest mode and tanned faces out of which shine eyes blue as stones, the women with their high, high heels, their carefully made-up mouths, their tiny waists and breasts that never sag—seem to inhabit an alien world of romance and intrigue and designer clothes that fit perfectly.

The couple on the screen right now weren’t wearing designer clothes, though. In fact, they weren’t wearing anything at all, and when I got over the shock I realized that I’d turned on the cable channel which Ashok had ordered last month and which he watched, in spite of the fact that I pointedly left the room whenever he turned it on (or maybe because of it), almost every night.

My face hot, I switched off the TV. Really, the things they’ll show on the air nowadays, I said to myself indignantly as I got up to leave. It was a good thing we didn’t have kids in the house.

Halfway up the stairs I stopped. I stood there for a while, listening to the wall clock ticking, and then I came down and, heart pounding, turned on the set again. I wasn’t
sure why I did it. Maybe I just wanted to examine, without the inhibition of his presence, what it was that Ashok enjoyed about these shows. Or maybe it was something else.