Interpreter of Maladies (12 page)

Miranda found London, where Laxmi’s cousin’s husband was, with the woman he’d met on the plane. She wondered which of the cities in India Dev’s wife was in. The farthest Miranda had ever been was to the Bahamas once when she was a child. She searched but couldn’t find it on the glass panels. When the tourists left and she and Dev were alone again, he told her to stand at one end of the bridge. Even though they were thirty feet apart, Dev said, they’d be able to hear each other whisper.

“I don’t believe you,” Miranda said. It was the first time she’d spoken since they’d entered. She felt as if speakers were embedded in her ears.

“Go ahead,” he urged, walking backward to his end of the bridge. His voice dropped to a whisper. “Say something.” She watched his lips forming the words; at the same time she heard them so clearly that she felt them under her skin, under her winter coat, so near and full of warmth that she felt herself go hot.

“Hi,” she whispered, unsure of what else to say.

“You’re sexy,” he whispered back.

At work the following week, Laxmi told Miranda that it wasn’t the first time her cousin’s husband had had an affair. “She’s decided to let him come to his senses,” Laxmi said one evening as they were getting ready to leave the office. “She says it’s for the boy. She’s willing to forgive him for the boy.” Miranda waited as Laxmi shut off her computer. “He’ll come crawling back, and she’ll let him,” Laxmi said, shaking her head. “Not
me. If my husband so much as looked at another woman I’d change the locks.” She studied the picture tacked to her cubicle. Laxmi’s husband had his arm draped over her shoulder, his knees leaning in toward her on the bench. She turned to Miranda. “Wouldn’t you?”

She nodded. Dev’s wife was coming back from India the next day. That afternoon he’d called Miranda at work, to say he had to go to the airport to pick her up. He promised he’d call as soon as he could.

“What’s the Taj Mahal like?” she asked Laxmi.

“The most romantic spot on earth.” Laxmi’s face brightened at the memory. “An everlasting monument to love.”

While Dev was at the airport, Miranda went to Filene’s Basement to buy herself things she thought a mistress should have. She found a pair of black high heels with buckles smaller than a baby’s teeth. She found a satin slip with scalloped edges and a knee-length silk robe. Instead of the pantyhose she normally wore to work, she found sheer stockings with a seam. She searched through piles and wandered through racks, pressing back hanger after hanger, until she found a cocktail dress made of a slinky silvery material that matched her eyes, with little chains for straps. As she shopped she thought about Dev, and about what he’d told her in the Mapparium. It was the first time a man had called her sexy, and when she closed her eyes she could still feel his whisper drifting through her body, under her skin. In the fitting room, which was just one big room with mirrors on the walls, she found a spot next to an older woman with a shiny face and coarse frosted hair. The woman stood barefoot in her underwear, pulling the black net of a body stocking taut between her fingers.

“Always check for snags,” the woman advised.

Miranda pulled out the satin slip with scalloped edges. She held it to her chest.

The woman nodded with approval. “Oh yes.”

“And this?” She held up the silver cocktail dress.

“Absolutely,” the woman said. “He’ll want to rip it right off you.”

Miranda pictured the two of them at a restaurant in the South End they’d been to, where Dev had ordered foie gras and a soup made with champagne and raspberries. She pictured herself in the cocktail dress, and Dev in one of his suits, kissing her hand across the table. Only the next time Dev came to visit her, on a Sunday afternoon several days since the last time they’d seen each other, he was in gym clothes. After his wife came back, that was his excuse: on Sundays he drove into Boston and went running along the Charles. The first Sunday she opened the door in the knee-length robe, but Dev didn’t even notice it; he carried her over to the bed, wearing sweatpants and sneakers, and entered her without a word. Later, she slipped on the robe when she walked across the room to get him a saucer for his cigarette ashes, but he complained that she was depriving him of the sight of her long legs, and demanded that she remove it. So the next Sunday she didn’t bother. She wore jeans. She kept the lingerie at the back of a drawer, behind her socks and everyday underwear. The silver cocktail dress hung in her closet, the tag dangling from the seam. Often, in the morning, the dress would be in a heap on the floor; the chain straps always slipped off the metal hanger.

Still, Miranda looked forward to Sundays. In the mornings she went to a deli and bought a baguette and little containers of things Dev liked to eat, like pickled herring, and potato salad, and tortes of pesto and mascarpone cheese. They ate in
bed, picking up the herring with their fingers and ripping the baguette with their hands. Dev told her stories about his childhood, when he would come home from school and drink mango juice served to him on a tray, and then play cricket by a lake, dressed all in white. He told her about how, at eighteen, he’d been sent to a college in upstate New York during something called the Emergency, and about how it took him years to be able to follow American accents in movies, in spite of the fact that he’d had an English-medium education. As he talked he smoked three cigarettes, crushing them in a saucer by the side of her bed. Sometimes he asked her questions, like how many lovers she’d had (three) and how old she’d been the first time (nineteen). After lunch they made love, on sheets covered with crumbs, and then Dev took a nap for twelve minutes. Miranda had never known an adult who took naps, but Dev said it was something he’d grown up doing in India, where it was so hot that people didn’t leave their homes until the sun went down. “Plus it allows us to sleep together,” he murmured mischievously, curving his arm like a big bracelet around her body.

Only Miranda never slept. She watched the clock on her bedside table, or pressed her face against Dev’s fingers, intertwined with hers, each with its half-dozen hairs at the knuckle. After six minutes she turned to face him, sighing and stretching, to test if he was really sleeping. He always was. His ribs were visible through his skin as he breathed, and yet he was beginning to develop a paunch. He complained about the hair on his shoulders, but Miranda thought him perfect, and refused to imagine him any other way.

At the end of twelve minutes Dev would open his eyes as if he’d been awake all along, smiling at her, full of a contentment she wished she felt herself. “The best twelve minutes of the
week.” He’d sigh, running a hand along the backs of her calves. Then he’d spring out of bed, pulling on his sweatpants and lacing up his sneakers. He would go to the bathroom and brush his teeth with his index finger, something he told her all Indians knew how to do, to get rid of the smoke in his mouth. When she kissed him good-bye she smelled herself sometimes in his hair. But she knew that his excuse, that he’d spent the afternoon jogging, allowed him to take a shower when he got home, first thing.

Apart from Laxmi and Dev, the only Indians whom Miranda had known were a family in the neighborhood where she’d grown up, named the Dixits. Much to the amusement of the neighborhood children, including Miranda, but not including the Dixit children, Mr. Dixit would jog each evening along the flat winding streets of their development in his everyday shirt and trousers, his only concession to athletic apparel a pair of cheap Keds. Every weekend, the family—mother, father, two boys, and a girl—piled into their car and went away, to where nobody knew. The fathers complained that Mr. Dixit did not fertilize his lawn properly, did not rake his leaves on time, and agreed that the Dixits’ house, the only one with vinyl siding, detracted from the neighborhood’s charm. The mothers never invited Mrs. Dixit to join them around the Armstrongs’ swimming pool. Waiting for the school bus with the Dixit children standing to one side, the other children would say “The Dixits dig shit,” under their breath, and then burst into laughter.

One year, all the neighborhood children were invited to the birthday party of the Dixit girl. Miranda remembered a heavy aroma of incense and onions in the house, and a pile of shoes heaped by the front door. But most of all she remembered a
piece of fabric, about the size of a pillowcase, which hung from a wooden dowel at the bottom of the stairs. It was a painting of a naked woman with a red face shaped like a knight’s shield. She had enormous white eyes that tilted toward her temples, and mere dots for pupils. Two circles, with the same dots at their centers, indicated her breasts. In one hand she brandished a dagger. With one foot she crushed a struggling man on the ground. Around her body was a necklace composed of bleeding heads, strung together like a popcorn chain. She stuck her tongue out at Miranda.

“It is the goddess Kali,” Mrs. Dixit explained brightly, shifting the dowel slightly in order to straighten the image. Mrs. Dixit’s hands were painted with henna, an intricate pattern of zigzags and stars. “Come please, time for cake.”

Miranda, then nine years old, had been too frightened to eat the cake. For months afterward she’d been too frightened even to walk on the same side of the street as the Dixits’ house, which she had to pass twice daily, once to get to the bus stop, and once again to come home. For a while she even held her breath until she reached the next lawn, just as she did when the school bus passed a cemetery.

It shamed her now. Now, when she and Dev made love, Miranda closed her eyes and saw deserts and elephants, and marble pavilions floating on lakes beneath a full moon. One Saturday, having nothing else to do, she walked all the way to Central Square, to an Indian restaurant, and ordered a plate of tandoori chicken. As she ate she tried to memorize phrases printed at the bottom of the menu, for things like “delicious” and “water” and “check, please.” The phrases didn’t stick in her mind, and so she began to stop from time to time in the foreign-language section of a bookstore in Kenmore Square, where she studied the Bengali alphabet in the Teach Yourself
series. Once she went so far as to try to transcribe the Indian part of her name, “Mira,” into her Filofax, her hand moving in unfamiliar directions, stopping and turning and picking up her pen when she least expected to. Following the arrows in the book, she drew a bar from left to right from which the letters hung; one looked more like a number than a letter, another looked like a triangle on its side. It had taken her several tries to get the letters of her name to resemble the sample letters in the book, and even then she wasn’t sure if she’d written Mira or Mara. It was a scribble to her, but somewhere in the world, she realized with a shock, it meant something.

During the week it wasn’t so bad. Work kept her busy, and she and Laxmi had begun having lunch together at a new Indian restaurant around the corner, during which Laxmi reported the latest status of her cousin’s marriage. Sometimes Miranda tried to change the topic; it made her feel the way she once felt in college, when she and her boyfriend at the time had walked away from a crowded house of pancakes without paying for their food, just to see if they could get away with it. But Laxmi spoke of nothing else. “If I were her I’d fly straight to London and shoot them both,” she announced one day. She snapped a papadum in half and dipped it into chutney. “I don’t know how she can just wait this way.”

Miranda knew how to wait. In the evenings she sat at her dining table and coated her nails with clear nail polish, and ate salad straight from the salad bowl, and watched television, and waited for Sunday. Saturdays were the worst because by Saturday it seemed that Sunday would never come. One Saturday when Dev called, late at night, she heard people laughing and talking in the background, so many that she asked him if he
was at a concert hall. But he was only calling from his house in the suburbs. “I can’t hear you that well,” he said. “We have guests. Miss me?” She looked at the television screen, a sitcom that she’d muted with the remote control when the phone rang. She pictured him whispering into his cell phone, in a room upstairs, a hand on the doorknob, the hallway filled with guests. “Miranda, do you miss me?” he asked again. She told him that she did.

The next day, when Dev came to visit, Miranda asked him what his wife looked like. She was nervous to ask, waiting until he’d smoked the last of his cigarettes, crushing it with a firm twist into the saucer. She wondered if they’d quarrel. But Dev wasn’t surprised by the question. He told her, spreading some smoked whitefish on a cracker, that his wife resembled an actress in Bombay named Madhuri Dixit.

For an instant Miranda’s heart stopped. But no, the Dixit girl had been named something else, something that began with P. Still, she wondered if the actress and the Dixit girl were related. She’d been plain, wearing her hair in two braids all through high school.

A few days later Miranda went to an Indian grocery in Central Square which also rented videos. The door opened to a complicated tinkling of bells. It was dinnertime, and she was the only customer. A video was playing on a television hooked up in a corner of the store: a row of young women in harem pants were thrusting their hips in synchrony on a beach.

“Can I help you?” the man standing at the cash register asked. He was eating a samosa, dipping it into some dark brown sauce on a paper plate. Below the glass counter at his waist were trays of more plump samosas, and what looked like pale, diamond-shaped pieces of fudge covered with foil, and
some bright orange pastries floating in syrup. “You like some video?”

Miranda opened up her Filofax, where she had written “Mottery Dixit.” She looked up at the videos on the shelves behind the counter. She saw women wearing skirts that sat low on the hips and tops that tied like bandannas between their breasts. Some leaned back against a stone wall, or a tree. They were beautiful, the way the women dancing on the beach were beautiful, with kohl-rimmed eyes and long black hair. She knew then that Madhuri Dixit was beautiful, too.

“We have subtitled versions, miss,” the man continued. He wiped his fingertips quickly on his shirt and pulled out three titles.