Arranged Marriage: Stories (7 page)

“Pratima,” he cries in a broken voice, “Pratima, Pratima.” He touches her face, his fingers groping uncertainly like a blind man’s, his whole body shaking.

“Hush, Ram,” says my aunt. “Hush.” She strokes his hair as though he were a child, and perhaps he is.

“Pratima, how could I….”

“Shhh, I am understanding.”

“Something exploded in my head … it was like that time at the shop … remember … how the fire they started took everything….”

“Don’t be thinking of it now, Ram,” says Aunt Pratima. She pulls his head down to her breast and lays her cheek on his hair. Her fingers caress the scar on his neck. Her face is calm, almost happy. She—they—have forgotten me.

I feel like an intruder, a fool. How little I’ve understood. As I turn to tiptoe away to my room, I hear my uncle say, “I tried so hard, Pratima. I wanted to give you so many things—but even your jewelry is gone.” Grief scrapes at his voice. “This damn country, like a
dain
, a witch—it pretends to give and then snatches everything back.”

And Aunt’s voice, pure and musical with the lilt of a smile in it, “O Ram, I am having all I need.”

Now it is night but no one has thought to turn on the family-room lights. Bikram-uncle sits in front of the TV, his feet up on the rickety coffee table. He is finishing his third beer. The can gleams faintly as it catches the uneven blue flickers from the tube. I feel I should say something to him, but he is not looking at me, and I don’t know what to say. Aunt Pratima is in the kitchen preparing dinner as though this were an evening like all others. I should go and help her. But I remain in my chair in the corner of the room. I am not sure how to face her either, how to start talking about what has happened. (In my head I am trying to make sense of it still.) Am I to ignore it all
(can
I?)—the hate-suffused faces of the boys, the swelling spreading its dark blotch across Aunt’s jaw, the memory of Uncle’s head pressed trembling to her breast?
Home
, I whisper desperately,
homehomehome
, and suddenly, intensely, I want my room in Calcutta, where things were so much simpler. I want the high mahogany bed in which I’ve slept as long as I can remember, the comforting smell of sun-dried cotton sheets to pull around my head. I want my childhood again. But I am too far away for the spell to work, for the words to take me back, even in my head.

Then out of the corner of my eye I catch a white movement. It is snowing. I step outside onto the balcony, drawing my breath in at the silver marvel of it, the fat flakes cool and wet against my face as in a half-forgotten movie. It is cold, so cold that I can feel the insides of my nostrils stiffening. The air—there is no smell to it at all—carves a freezing path all the way into my chest. But I don’t go back inside. The snow has covered the dirty cement pavements, the sad warped shingles of the rooftops, has softened, forgivingly, the rough noisy
edges of things. I hold out my hands to it, palms down, shivering a little.

The snow falls on them, chill, stinging all the way to the bone. But after a while the excruciating pain fades. I am thinking of hands. The pink-tipped blond hand of the air hostess as she offers me a warm towelette that smells like unknown flowers. The boys grimy one pushing back his limp hair, then tightening into a fist to throw a lump of slush. Uncle’s with its black nails, its oddly defenseless scraped knuckles, arcing through the air to knock Aunt’s head sideways. And Aunt’s hand, stroking that angry pink scar. Threading her long elegant fingers (the fingers, still, of a Bengali aristocrat’s daughter) through his graying hair to pull him to her. All these American hands that I know will keep coming back in my dreams.

Will I marry a prince from a far-off magic land
Where the pavements are silver and the roofs all gold?

When I finally look down, I notice that the snow has covered my own hands so they are no longer brown but white, white, white. And now it makes sense that the beauty and the pain should be part of each other. I continue holding them out in front of me, gazing at them, until they’re completely covered. Until they do not hurt at all.

THE WORD LOVE

Y
OU PRACTICE THEM OUT LOUD FOR DAYS IN FRONT OF
the bathroom mirror, the words with which you’ll tell your mother you’re living with a man. Sometimes they are words of confession and repentance. Sometimes they are angry, defiant. Sometimes they melt into a single, sighing sound.
Love
. You let the water run so he won’t hear you and ask what those foreign phrases you keep saying mean. You don’t want to have to explain, don’t want another argument like last time.

“Why are you doing this to yourself?” he’d asked, throwing his books down on the table when he returned from class to find you curled into a corner of the sagging sofa you’d bought together at a Berkeley garage sale. You’d washed your face but he knew right away that you’d been crying. Around you, wads of paper crumpled tight as stones. (This was when you thought writing would be the best way.) “I hate
seeing you like this.” Then he added, his tone darkening, “You’re acting like I was some kind of a criminal.”

You’d watched the upside-down titles of his books splaying across the table.
Control Systems Engineering. Boiler Operations Guide. Handbook of Shock and Vibration
. Cryptic as tarot cards, they seemed to be telling you something. If only you could decipher it.

“It isn’t you,” you’d said, gathering up the books guiltily, smoothing their covers. Holding them tight against you. “I’d have the same problem no matter who it was.”

You tried to tell him about your mother, how she’d seen her husband’s face for the first time at her wedding. How, when he died (you were two years old then), she had taken off her jewelry and put on widow’s white and dedicated the rest of her life to the business of bringing you up.
We only have each other
, she often told you.

“So?”

“She lives in a different world. Can’t you see that? She’s never traveled more than a hundred miles from the village where she was born; she’s never touched cigarettes or alcohol; even though she lives in Calcutta, she’s never watched a movie.”

“Are you serious!”

“I love her, Rex.” I
will not feel apologetic
, you told yourself. You wanted him to know that when you conjured up her face, the stern angles of it softening into a rare smile, the silver at her temples catching the afternoon sun in the backyard under the pomegranate tree, love made you breathless, as though someone had punched a hole through your chest. But he interrupted.

“So don’t tell her,” he said, “that you’re living in sin. With a foreigner, no less. Someone whose favorite food is sacred cow steak and Budweiser. Who pops a pill now and then when he gets depressed. The shock’ll probably do her in.”

You hate it when he talks like that, biting off the ends of words and spitting them out. You try to tell yourself that he wants to hurt you only because
he’s
hurting, because he’s jealous of how much she means to you. You try to remember the special times. The morning he showed up outside your Shakespeare class with violets the color of his eyes. The evening when the two of you drove up to Grizzly Peak and watched the sunset spreading red over the Bay while he told you of his childhood, years of being shunted between his divorced parents till he was old enough to move out. How you had held him. The night in his apartment (has it only been three months?) when he took your hands in his warm strong ones, asking you to move in with him, please, because he really needed you. You try to shut out the whispery voice that lives behind the ache in your eyes, the one that started when you said yes and he kissed you, hard.

Mistake
, says the voice, whispering in your mother’s tones.

Sometimes the voice sounds different, not hers. It is a rushed intake of air, as just before someone asks a question that might change your life. You don’t want to hear the question, which might be
how did you get yourself into this mess
, or perhaps
why
, so you leap in with that magic word.
Love
, you tell yourself,
lovelovelove
. But you know, deep down, that words solve nothing.

And so you no longer try to explain to him why you
must
tell your mother. You just stand in the bathroom in front of the crooked mirror with tarnished edges and practice the words. You try not to notice that the eyes in the mirror are so like her eyes, that same vertical line between the brows. The line of your jaw slants up at the same angle as hers when she would lean forward to kiss you goodbye at the door. Outside a wino shouts something. Crash of broken glass and, later, police sirens. But you’re hearing the street vendor call out
momphali, momphali, fresh and hot
, and she’s smiling, handing you a coin, saying,
yes, baby, you can have some
. The salty crunch of roasted peanuts fills your mouth, the bathroom water runs and runs, endless as sorrow, the week blurs past, and suddenly it’s Saturday morning, the time of her weekly call.

She tells you how Aunt Arati’s arthritis isn’t getting any better in spite of the turmeric poultices. It’s so cold this year in Calcutta, the
shiuli
flowers have all died. You listen, holding on to the rounded o’s, the long liquid
e’s
, the
s’s
that brush against your face soft as night kisses. She’s trying to arrange a marriage for cousin Leela who’s going to graduate from college next year, remember? She misses you. Do you like your new apartment? How long before you finish the Ph.D. and come home for good? Her voice is small and far, tinny with static. “You’re so quiet…. Are you OK,
shona?
Is something bothering you?” You want to tell her, but your heart flings itself around in your chest like a netted bird, and the words that you practiced so long are gone.

“I’m fine, Ma,” you say. “Everything’s all right.”

The first thing you did when you moved into his apartment was to put up the batik hanging, deep red flowers winding around a black circle. The late summer sun shone through the open window. Smell of California honeysuckle in the air, a radio next door playing Mozart. He walked in, narrowing his eyes, pausing to watch. You waited, pin in hand, the nubs of the fabric pulsing under your palm, erratic as a heart. “Not bad,” he nodded finally, and you let out your breath in a relieved shiver of a laugh.

“My mother gave it to me,” you said. “A going-away-to-college gift, a talisman….” You started to tell him how she had bought it at the Maidan fair on a day as beautiful as this one, the buds just coming out on the mango trees, the red-breasted bulbuls returning north. But he held up his hand,
later
. Swung you off the rickety chair and carried you to the bed. Lay on top, pinning you down. His eyes were sapphire stones. His hair caught the light, glinting like warm sandstone. Surge of electric (love or fear?) up your spine, making you shiver, making you forget what you wanted to say.