Arranged Marriage: Stories (6 page)

But here my imagination, conditioned by a lifetime of maternal censorship, shuts itself down.

After lunch the next day I walk out onto the narrow balcony. It is still cold, but the sun is finally out. The sky stretches over me, a sheet of polished metal. The skyscrapers of downtown Chicago float glimmering in the distance, enchanted towers out of an old storybook. The air is so new and crisp that it makes me suddenly happy, full of hope.

As a child in India, sometimes I used to sing a song.
Will I marry a prince from a far-off magic land, where the pavements are silver and the roofs all gold?
My girlfriends and I would play skipping games to its rhythm, laughing carelessly, thoughtlessly. And now here I am.
America
, I think, and the word opens inside me like a folded paper flower placed in water, filling me until there is no room to breathe.

The apartment with its faded cushions and its crookedly hung pictures seems newly oppressive when I go back inside. Aunt is in the kitchen—where I have noticed she spends most of her time—chopping vegetables.

“Can we go for a walk?” I ask. “Please?”

Aunt looks doubtful. “It is being very cold outside,” she tells me.

“Oh no,” I assure her. “I was just out on the balcony and it’s lovely, it really is.”

“Your uncle does not like me to go out. He is telling me it is dangerous.”

“How can it be dangerous?” I say. It’s just a ploy of his to keep her shut up in the house and under his control. He would like to do the same with me, only I won’t let him. I pull her by the hand to the window. “Look,” I say. The streets are
clean and empty and very wide. A gleaming blue car speeds by. A bus belches to a stop and two laughing girls get down.

I can feel Aunt weakening. But she says, “Better to wait. This weekend he is taking us to the mall. So many big big shops there, you’ll like it. He says he will buy pizza for dinner. Do you know pizza? Is it coming to India yet?”

I want to tell her that the walls are closing in on me. My brain is dying. Soon I will turn into one of those mournful-eyed cows in the painting behind the sofa.

“Just a short walk for some exercise,” I say. “We’ll be back long before Uncle. He need not even know.”

Maybe Aunt Pratima hears the longing in my voice. Maybe it makes her feel guilty. She lifts her thin face. When she smiles, she seems not that much older than me.

“In the village before marriage I was always walking everywhere—it was so nice, the fresh air, the sky, the ponds with lotus flowers, the dogs and goats and chickens all around. Of course, here we cannot be expecting such country things….”

I wait.

“No harm in it, I am thinking,” she finally says. “As long as we are staying close to the house. As long as we are coming back in time to fix a nice dinner for your uncle.”

“Just a half-hour walk,” I assure her. “Well be back in plenty of time.”

As we walk down the dim corridor that smells, just like the apartment, of stale curry (do the neighbors mind?), she adds, a bit apologetically, “Please do not be saying anything to Uncle. It will make him angry.” She shakes her head. “He worries too much since …”

I want to ask her since what, but I sense she doesn’t want to talk about it. I give her a bright smile.

“I won’t say a word to Uncle. It’ll be our secret.”

In coats and saris we walk down the street. A few pedestrians stare at us silently as they sidle past. I miss the bustle of the Calcutta streets a little, the hawkers with their bright wares, the honking buses loaded with people, the rickshaw-wallahs calling out
make way
, but I say, “It’s so neat and quiet, isn’t it?”

“Every Wednesday the cleaning truck is coming with big brushes to sweep the streets,” Aunt tells me proudly.

The sun has ducked behind a cloud, and it is colder than I had thought. When I look up the April light is a muted glare that hurts my eyes.

“It is probably snowing later today,” Aunt says.

“That’s wonderful! You know, I’ve only seen snow in movies! It always looked so pretty and delicate. I didn’t think I’d get to see any this late in the year….”

Aunt pulls her shapeless coat tighter around her. “It is not that great,” she says. Her tone is regretful, as though she is sorry to disillusion me. “It melts inside the collar of your jacket and drips down your back. Cars are skidding when it turns to ice. And see how it looks like afterward….” She lacks at the brown slush on the side of the road with a force that surprises me.

I like my aunt though, the endearing way in which her eyes widen like a little girl’s when she asks a question, the small frown line between her eyebrows when she listens, the
sudden, liquid shift of her features when she smiles. I remember that she’d been considered a beauty back home, someone who deserved the good luck of having a marriage arranged with a man who lived in America.

As we walk, the brisk, invigorating air seems to loosen something inside of Aunt. She talks and talks. She asks about the design on my sari, deep rose-embroidered peacocks dancing against a cream background. Is this being the latest fashion in India? (She uses the word
desh
, country, to refer to India, as though it were the only one in the world.) “I am always loving Calcutta, visiting your mother in that beautiful old house with marble fountains and lions.” She wants to know what movies are showing at the Roxy. Do children still fly the moon-shaped kites at the Maidan and do the street vendors still sell puffed rice spiced with green chilies? How about Victoria Memorial with the black angel on top of the white marble dome, is it still the same? Is it true that New Market with all those charming little clothing stores has burnt down? Have I been on the new subway she has read about in
India Abroad?
The words pour from her in a rush. “Imagine all those tunnels under the city, you could be getting lost in there and nobody will be finding you if you do not want them to.” I hear the hunger in her voice. And so I hold back my own eagerness to learn about America and answer her the best I can.

The street has narrowed now and the apartment buildings look run-down, even to me, with peeling walls and patchy yellow spots on lawns where the snow has melted. There are chain-link fences and garbage on the pavement. Broken-down cars, their rusted hoods gaping, sit in several front yards. The
sweet stench of rot rises from the drains. I am disconcerted. I thought I had left all such smells behind in Calcutta.

“Shouldn’t we be going back, Aunt?” I ask, suddenly nervous.

Aunt Pratima looks around blindly.

“Yes yes, my goodness, is it that late already? Look at that black sky. It is so nice to be talking to someone about home that I am forgetting the time completely.”

We start back, lifting up our saris to walk faster, our steps echoing along the empty sidewalk, and when we go back a bit Aunt stops and looks up and down the street without recognition, her head pivoting loosely like a lost animal’s.

Then we see the boys. Four of them, playing in the middle of the street with cans and sticks. They hadn’t been there before, or maybe it is a different street we are on now. The boys look up and I see that their sallow faces are grime-streaked. Their blond hair hangs limply over their foreheads, and their eyes are pale and slippery, like pebbles left underwater for a long time. They may be anywhere from eight to fourteen—I can’t tell their ages as I would with boys back home. They scare me on this deserted street although surely there’s no reason for fear. They’re just boys after all, with thin wrists that stick out from the sleeves of too-small jackets, standing under a tree on which the first leaves of spring are opening a pale and delicate green. I glance at Aunt Pratima for reassurance, but the skin on her face stretches tightly across her sharp, fragile cheekbones.

The boys bend their heads together, consulting, then the tallest one takes a step toward us and says, “Nigger.” He says it softly, his upper hp curling away from his teeth. The word
arcs through the empty street like a rock, an impossible word which belongs to another place and time. In the mouth of a red-faced gin-and-tonic drinking British official, perhaps, in his colonial bungalow, or a sneering overseer out of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
as he plies his whip in the cotton fields. But here is this boy, younger than my cousin Anup, saying it as easily as one might say
thank you
or
please
. Or
no problem
.

Now the others take up the word, chanting it in high singsong voices that have not broken yet, nigger,
nigger
, until I want to scream, or weep. Or laugh, because can’t they
see
that I’m not black at all but an Indian girl of good family? When our chauffeur Gurbans Singh drives me down the Calcutta streets in our silver-colored Fiat, people stop to whisper,
Isn’t that Jayanti Ganguli, daughter of the Bhavanipur Gangulis?

I don’t see which boy first picks up the fistful of slush, but now they’re all throwing it at us. It splatters on our coats and runs down our saris, leaving long streaks. I take a step toward the boys. I’m not sure what I’ll do when I get to them—shake them? explain the mistake they’ve made? smash their faces into the pavement?—but Aunt holds tight to my arm.

“No, Jayanti, no.”

I try to pull free but she is surprisingly strong, or perhaps I’m not trying hard enough. Perhaps I’m secretly thankful that she’s begging me—
Let’s go home, Jayanti
—so that I don’t have to confront those boys with more hate in their eyes than boys should ever have. There is slush on Aunt’s face; her trembling lips are ash-colored. She’s sobbing, and when I put out my hand to comfort her I realize that I too am sobbing.

Half running, tripping on the wet saris which slap at our
legs, we retreat down the street. The voices follow us for a long time.
Nigger, nigger
. Slush-voices, trickling into us even when we’ve finally found the right road back to our building, which had been only one street away all the time. Even when in the creaking elevator we tidy each other as best we can, wiping at faces, brushing off coats, holding each other’s shivering hands, looking away from each other’s eyes.

The light has burned out in the passage outside the door. Aunt Pratima fumbles in her purse for the key, saying, “It was here, I am keeping it right here, where can it
go?’

In their thin Indian shoes, my feet are colder than I have ever imagined possible. My teeth chatter as I say, “It’s all right, calm down, Auntie, we’ll find it.”

But Aunt’s voice quavers higher and higher, a bucking, runaway voice. She turns her purse upside down and shakes it, coins and wrappers and pens and safety pins tumbling out and skittering to the edges of the passage. Then she gets down on all fours on the mangy brown carpet to grope through them.

That is when Bikram-uncle opens the door. He is still wearing his grease-stained overalls. “What the hell is going on?” he says, looking down at Aunt. Standing across from him, I look down too, and see what he must be seeing, the parting in Aunt Pratima’s tightly pulled-back hair, the stretched line of the scalp pointing grayly at her lowered forehead like an accusation.

“Where the hell have you been?” Bikram-uncle asks, more loudly this time. “Get in here right now.”

I kneel and help Aunt gather up some of her things, leaving the rest behind.

Inside, Bikram-uncle yells, “Haven’t I
told
you not to
walk around this trashy neighborhood? Haven’t I
told
you it wasn’t safe? Don’t you remember what happened to my shop last year, how they smashed everything? And still you had to go out, had to give them the chance to do
this
to you.” He draws in a ragged breath, like a sob. “My God, look at you.”

I try not to stare at Aunt’s mud-splotched cheek, her ruined coat, her red-rimmed, pleading glance. But I can’t drag my eyes away. Once when I was little, I’d looked down into an old well behind Grandfather’s house and seen my face, pale and distorted, reflected in the brackish water. I have that same dizzying sensation now.
Is this what my life too will be like?

“It was my fault,” I say. “Aunt didn’t want to go.” But no one hears me.

Aunt takes a hesitant, sideways step toward Uncle. It is a small movement, something aft injured animal might make toward its keeper. “They were only children,” she says in a wondering tone.

“Bastards,” cries Uncle, his voice choking, his accent suddenly thick and Indian. “Bloody bastards. I want to kill them, all of them.” His entire face wavers, as though it will collapse in on itself. He raises his arm.

“No,” I shout. I run toward them. But my body moves slowly, as though underwater. Perhaps it cannot believe that he will really do it.

When the back of his hand catches Aunt Pratima across the mouth, I flinch as if his knuckles had made that thwacking bone sound against my own flesh. My mouth fills with an ominous salt taste.

Will I marry a prince from a far-off magic land?

I put out my hand to shield Aunt, but Uncle is quicker. He has her already tight in his grasp. I look about wildly for something—perhaps a chair to bring crashing down on his head. Then I hear him.