Arranged Marriage: Stories (4 page)

Somesh has bought me a cream blouse with a long brown skirt. They match beautifully, like the inside and outside of an almond. “For when you begin working,” he says.
But first he wants me to start college. Get a degree, perhaps in teaching. I picture myself in front of a classroom of girls with blond pigtails and blue uniforms, like a scene out of an English movie I saw long ago in Calcutta. They raise their hands respectfully when I ask a question. “Do you really think I can?” I ask. “Of course,” he replies.

I am gratified he has such confidence in me. But I have another plan, a secret that I will divulge to him once we move. What I really want is to work in the store. I want to stand behind the counter in the cream-and-brown skirt set (color of earth, color of seeds) and ring up purchases. The register drawer will glide open. Confident, I will count out green dollars and silver quarters. Gleaming copper pennies. I will dust the jars of gilt-wrapped chocolates on the counter. Will straighten, on the far wall, posters of smiling young men raising their beer mugs to toast scantily clad redheads with huge spiky eyelashes. (I have never visited the store—my in-laws don’t consider it proper for a wife—but of course I know exactly what it looks like.) I will charm the customers with my smile, so that they will return again and again just to hear me telling them to have a nice day.

Meanwhile, I will the store to make money for us. Quickly. Because when we move, we’ll be paying for two households. But so far it hasn’t worked. They’re running at a loss, Somesh tells me. They had to let the hired help go. This means most nights Somesh has to take the graveyard shift (that horrible word, like a cold hand up my spine) because his partner refuses to.

“The bastard!” Somesh spat out once. “Just because he
put in more money he thinks he can order me around. Ill show him!” I was frightened by the vicious twist of his mouth. Somehow I’d never imagined that he could be angry.

Often Somesh leaves as soon as he has dinner and doesn’t get back till after I’ve made morning tea for Father and Mother Sen. I lie mostly awake those nights, picturing masked intruders crouching in the shadowed back of the store, like I’ve seen on the police shows that Father Sen sometimes watches. But Somesh insists there’s nothing to worry about, they have bars on the windows and a burglar alarm. “And remember,” he says, “the extra cash will help us move out that much quicker.”

I’m wearing a nightie now, my very first one. It’s black and lacy, with a bit of a shine to it, and it glides over my hips to stop outrageously at mid-thigh. My mouth is an O of surprise in the mirror, my legs long and pale and sleek from the hair remover I asked Somesh to buy me last week. The legs of a movie star. Somesh laughs at the look on my face, then says, “You’re beautiful.” His voice starts a flutter low in my belly.

“Do you really think so,” I ask, mostly because I want to hear him say it again. No one has called me beautiful before. My father would have thought it inappropriate, my mother that it would make me vain.

Somesh draws me close. “Very beautiful,” he whispers. “The most beautiful woman in the whole world.” His eyes are not joking as they usually are. I want to turn off the light, but “Please,” he says, “I want to keep seeing your face.” His fingers are taking the pins from my hair, undoing my braids. The escaped strands fall on his face like dark rain. We have already decided where we will hide my new American clothes—the
jeans and T-shirt camouflaged on a hanger among Somesh’s pants, the skirt set and nightie at the bottom of my suitcase, a sandalwood sachet tucked between them, waiting.

I stand in the middle of our empty bedroom, my hair still wet from the purification bath, my back to the stripped bed I can’t bear to look at. I hold in my hands the plain white sari I’m supposed to wear. I must hurry. Any minute now there’ll be a knock at the door. They are afraid to leave me alone too long, afraid I might do something to myself.

The sari, a thick voile that will bunch around the waist when worn, is borrowed. White. Widow’s color, color of endings. I try to tuck it into the top of the petticoat, but my fingers are numb, disobedient. It spills through them and there are waves and waves of white around my feet. I kick out in sudden rage, but the sari is too soft, it gives too easily. I grab up an edge, clamp down with my teeth and pull, feeling a fierce, bitter satisfaction when I hear it rip.

There’s a cut, still stinging, on the side of my right arm, halfway to the elbow. It is from the bangle-breaking ceremony. Old Mrs. Ghosh performed the ritual, since she’s a widow, too. She took my hands in hers and brought them down hard on the bedpost, so that the glass bangles I was wearing shattered and multicolored shards flew out in every direction. Some landed on the body that was on the bed, covered with a sheet. I can’t call it Somesh. He was gone already. She took an edge of the sheet and rubbed the red marriage mark off my forehead. She was crying. All the women in the room were crying except me. I watched them as
though from the far end of a tunnel. Their flared nostrils, their red-veined eyes, the runnels of tears, salt-corrosive, down their cheeks.

It happened last night. He was at the store. “It isn’t too bad,” he would tell me on the days when he was in a good mood. “Not too many customers. I can put up my feet and watch MTV all night. I can sing along with Michael Jackson as loud as I want.” He had a good voice, Somesh. Sometimes he would sing softly at night, lying in bed, holding me. Hindi songs of love,
Mere Sapnon Ki Rani
, queen of my dreams. (He would not sing American songs at home out of respect for his parents, who thought they were decadent.) I would feel his warm breath on my hair as I fell asleep.

Someone came into the store last night. He took all the money, even the little rolls of pennies I had helped Somesh make up. Before he left he emptied the bullets from his gun into my husband’s chest.

“Only thing is,” Somesh would say about the night shifts, “I really miss you. I sit there and think of you asleep in bed. Do you know that when you sleep you make your hands into fists, like a baby? When we move out, will you come along some nights to keep me company?”

My in-laws are good people, kind. They made sure the body was covered before they let me into the room. When someone asked if my hair should be cut off, as they sometimes do with widows back home, they said no. They said I could stay at the apartment with Mrs. Ghosh if I didn’t want to go to the crematorium. They asked Dr. Das to give me something to calm me down when I couldn’t stop shivering. They didn’t say, even once, as people would surely have in the village, that
it was my bad luck that brought death to their son so soon after his marriage.

They will probably go back to India now. There’s nothing here for them anymore. They will want me to go with them. You’re like our daughter, they will say. Your home is with us, for as long as you want. For the rest of your life.
The rest of my life
. I can’t think about that yet. It makes me dizzy. Fragments are flying about my head, multicolored and piercing sharp like bits of bangle glass.

I
want you to go to college. Choose a career
. I stand in front of a classroom of smiling children who love me in my cream-and-brown American dress. A faceless parade straggles across my eyelids: all those customers at the store that I will never meet. The lace nightie, fragrant with sandalwood, waiting in its blackness inside my suitcase. The savings book where we have $3605.33.
Four thousand and we can move out, maybe next month
. The name of the panty hose I’d asked him to buy me for my birthday: sheer golden-beige. His lips, unexpectedly soft, woman-smooth. Elegant-necked wine bottles swept off shelves, shattering on the floor,

I know Somesh would not have tried to stop the gunman. I can picture his silhouette against the lighted Dewar’s sign, hands raised. He is trying to find the right expression to put on his face, calm, reassuring, reasonable.
OK, take the money. No, I won’t call the police
. His hands tremble just a little. His eyes darken with disbelief as his fingers touch his chest and come away wet.

I yanked away the cover. I had to see.
Great America, a place where people go to have fun
. My breath roller-coasting through my body, my unlived life gathering itself into a
scream. I’d expected blood, a lot of blood, the deep red-black of it crusting his chest. But they must have cleaned him up at the hospital. He was dressed in his silk wedding
kurta
. Against its warm ivory his face appeared remote, stern. The musky aroma of his aftershave lotion that someone must have sprinkled on the body. It didn’t quite hide that other smell, thin, sour, metallic. The smell of death. The floor shifted under me, tilting like a wave.

I’m lying on the floor now, on the spilled white sari. I feel sleepy. Or perhaps it is some other feeling I don’t have a word for. The sari is seductive-soft, drawing me into its folds.

Sometimes, bathing at the lake, I would move away from my friends, their endless chatter. I’d swim toward the middle of the water with a lazy backstroke, gazing at the sky, its enormous blueness drawing me up until I felt weightless and dizzy. Once in a while there would be a plane, a small silver needle drawn through the clouds, in and out, until it disappeared. Sometimes the thought came to me, as I floated in the middle of the lake with the sun beating down on my closed eyelids, that it would be so easy to let go, to drop into the dim brown world of mud, of water weeds fine as hair.

Once I almost did it. I curled my body inward, tight as a fist, and felt it start to sink. The sun grew pale and shapeless; the water, suddenly cold, licked at the insides of my ears in welcome. But in the end I couldn’t.

They are knocking on the door now, calling my name. I push myself off the floor, my body almost too heavy to lift up, as when one climbs out after a long swim. I’m surprised at how vividly it comes to me, this memory I haven’t called up in years: the desperate flailing of arms and legs as I fought my
way upward; the press of the water on me, heavy as terror; the wild animal trapped inside my chest, clawing at my lungs. The day returning to me as searing air, the way I drew it in, in, in, as though I would never have enough of it.

That’s when I know I cannot go back. I don’t know yet how I’ll manage, here in this new, dangerous land. I only know I must. Because all over India, at this very moment, widows in white saris are bowing their veiled heads, serving tea to in-laws. Doves with cut-off wings.

I am standing in front of the mirror now, gathering up the sari. I tuck in the ripped end so it lies next to my skin, my secret. I make myself think of the store, although it hurts. Inside the refrigerated unit, blue milk cartons neatly lined up by Somesh’s hands. The exotic smell of Hills Brothers coffee brewed black and strong, the glisten of sugar-glazed donuts nestled in tissue. The neon Budweiser emblem winking on and off like a risky invitation.

I straighten my shoulders and stand taller, take a deep breath. Air fills me—the same air that traveled through Somesh’s lungs a little while ago. The thought is like an unexpected, intimate gift. I tilt my chin, readying myself for the arguments of the coming weeks, the remonstrations. In the mirror a woman holds my gaze, her eyes apprehensive yet steady. She wears a blouse and skirt the color of almonds.

SILVER
PAVEMENTS,
GOLDEN ROOFS

I’
VE LOOKED FORWARD TO THIS DAY FOR SO LONG THAT
when I finally board the plane I can hardly breathe. In my hurry I bump into the air hostess who is at the door welcoming us, her brilliant pink smile an exact match for her brilliant pink nails.

“Sorry,” I say, “so very very sorry,” like the nuns had taught me to in those old, high-ceilinged classrooms cooled by the breeze from the convent
neem
trees. And I am. She is so blond, so American.

“No problem,” she replies, her smile as golden as the wavy hair that falls in perfect curls to her shoulder. I have never heard the expression before.
No problem
, I whisper to myself as I make my way down the aisle, in love with the exotic syllables.
No problem
. I finger my long hair, imprisoned in the customary tight braid that reaches below my waist. It
feels coarse and oily. As soon as I get to Chicago, I promise myself, I will have it cut and styled.

The air inside the plane smells different from the air I’ve known all my life in Calcutta, moist and weighted with the smell of mango blossoms and bus fumes and human sweat. This air is dry and cool and leaves a slight metallic aftertaste on my lips. I lick at them, wanting to capture that taste, make it part of me forever.

The little tray of food is so pretty, so sanitary. The knife and fork sealed in their own plastic packet, the monogrammed paper napkin. I want to save even the shiny tinfoil that covers the steaming dish. I feel sadness for my friends—Prema, Vaswati, Sabitri—who will never see any of this. I picture them standing outside Ramu’s
pakora
stall, munching on the spicy batter-dipped onion rings that our parents have expressly forbidden us to eat, looking up for a moment, eyes squinched against the sun, at the tiny silver plane. I pick up the candy in its crackly pink wrap from the dessert dish.
Almond Roca
, I read, and run my fingers over its nubby surface. I slip it into my purse, then take it out, laughing at my silliness. I am going to the land of Almond Rocas, I remind myself. The American chocolate melts in my mouth, just as sweet as I thought it would be.