Sister of My Heart (23 page)

In the banquet hall, everyone mills around us, offering congratulations. The mothers weep a little as they bless the bridegrooms and kiss Sudha and me. Then we’re seated at the bridal table at the far end of the hall, the four of us facing the guests, Ramesh, then Sudha, then Sunil, then myself. Ah, what a comedy of errors, what a crooked quadrangle of love! Ramesh—the only one who’s in high spirits—asks Sunil a million questions about America. Sudha stares down at the traditional banana-leaf platter in front of her as though she’s never seen one before. A slight film of sweat adds a dewy glitter to her face. I watch my husband trying to answer Ramesh without looking at Ramesh’s wife. I watch him trying to be considerate to me, telling me, a bit distractedly, to have a little food, maybe a bite of the fish fry. Asking if I feel well. I sense that he’s distressed by the emotions that have swept over him like a flash fire. That he would like to behave honorably. And I—I’m so scoured by rage and helpless love and jealousy that I can’t trust my voice to make a civil response. Yes, for the first time in my life I’m consumed by jealousy of Sudha, sister of my heart.

After the meal, we stand up to leave our table, Ramesh, then Sudha, then Sunil, then me in the rear. Sudha pulls her handkerchief from her waistband to wipe her face, and when she puts it back, it falls to the ground behind the table. It’s the special handkerchief Pishi embroidered with good luck lotuses—I have
an identical one tucked into my blouse. I’m about to alert her when Sunil bends to pick it up. I’m the only one who sees him slip it casually into his kurta pocket.

It doesn’t mean anything, I tell myself. He’s just waiting for the right moment to return it. But the rest of the evening a cold trembling takes over my legs, and the blood pounding in my ears seems to howl with derisive laughter.
Fool, fool, fool
.

How a single moment can destroy your entire life, crush all the happiness out of your heart if you let it. But I won’t let it! I can’t! It would bankrupt me—I’ve poured so much of myself into Sunil.

When Sudha and I are alone for a few minutes in the room where the women will come to dress us in our Bashar clothes for the long night of singing and jokes that follows the wedding, I ask her, “How does it feel?”

“What?” says Sudha as she pulls the heavy wedding garland from her neck wearily, letting it drop to the floor. “To be married?”

“No. To have my husband be crazily in love with you,” I say bitterly. But already I’m sorry for what I’ve said. Why am I blaming my innocent cousin for what’s not her fault?

“What are you talking about, Anju?” Sudha says, her voice anguished. I take a step toward her. I’m about to throw my arms around her neck and apologize. But she shrinks back and holds up her hands, as though she doesn’t want me to touch her. The look that flashes in her eyes is an emotion you can never mistake for anything else, especially if you’ve felt it yourself.

It’s knowing guilt I see on my cousin’s enchantress face.

Words crowd my mouth like gravel. I must spit them out. “Sudha, how could you do this to me?”

“Anju, no, wait,” Sudha cries. But I walk out of the room, lurching under the weight of the lesson I’ve learned less than one hour into wifehood: how quickly the sweetest love turns rancid when it isn’t returned. When the one you love loves someone else.

DOWNSTAIRS IN
the Bardhaman house it is noisy with festivity, but upstairs where I wait alone it is quiet enough for me to hear the thick, faltering beat of my heart. I am sitting in the room that is to be mine from tonight, on the high, garland-twined bed which used to belong to my husband’s parents, and his grandparents before them. Still dressed in the heavy purple silk I’d worn for the bridal feast, I am sweating a little, but mostly I’m cold with fear. The warnings of the teatime aunties echo in my ears. Someone has laid out my night-sari—a lacy, diaphanous affair—helpfully on the bed, but I cannot stand the thought of undressing, cannot stand the thought of what must follow, a stranger’s hands groping over me in lust and ownership.

I had gone through the wedding ceremony in a fog of numbness. I wrapped myself in it gratefully as though it were a magic shawl that could shield me from my life. I stood and sat and stood again, repeating mantras, smiling when I was expected to. If I could keep myself from feeling what I was undergoing, I told myself, then it wouldn’t become real. At some point I would wake to find I had dreamed it all. But the shawl of numbness tore when Anju looked at me with loathing and accused me of snaring her husband. There is nothing now to keep me from the full, chill weight of my despair.

My bridal night. How often in the last year I had daydreamed it. The tenderness with which my husband would lift my veil, his
lips on my shy eyelids like an invitation. The words of endearment with which he would unlock the secrets of my body. Now I dread those very things.

Ashok, what poisons are burning through your brain tonight? When I think of your letter,
you too will be betrayed by those you love
, black laughter wants to burst from my heart. Your curse has come true already, for isn’t the hatred in the eyes of my dearest cousin for whom I gave you up the worst of betrayals?

I hear footsteps on the stairs, the raucous laughter of the young men escorting Ramesh to the bedroom. He says good-bye to them and shuts the door. The sound of the bolt is like a bullet. As he walks toward me, I cannot stop myself from trembling. I clasp my hands tightly—I will not give him the advantage of knowing how frightened I am. He sits on the bed—but lightly, and not too close. We are silent—I am incapable of making light conversation, and he does not seem interested in it. When he leans over to take my hand, I flinch. Ramesh starts to say something, then stops. He works his fingers between my stiff ones and looks down at them, the dark and fair latticed together. “Do you find me so ugly?” he asks finally.

Astonishment makes me glance up into his eyes. It is not the question I expected my self-assured husband—for so he has appeared to me through the ceremonies—to ask. I can hear the disappointment in his voice, and the hurt. Somehow they lessen my fear.

Perhaps Ramesh was always conscious of his plainness, but these last few days must have been hard for him, with relatives exclaiming constantly over my looks. Many husbands would have grown irritated at so much attention being heaped upon their wives while they were ignored, but he’d been patient enough. Even when an old gentleman called me “the goddess Lakshmi come to earth,” the smile on Ramesh’s face hadn’t faltered.

But now the sadness in his words strikes a chord in me. Growing up my mother’s daughter, I know what it is to feel
inadequate. I do not want to be the cause of someone else feeling that way.

If Ramesh had been a woman, I would have put my arms around him and assured him that the problem was not in him but in the unbearable situation in which I found myself trapped—and who but myself could I blame for that? But I cannot take the chance of him misunderstanding such a gesture. So I focus my gaze on my silver toe rings, their small faraway glitter, and force myself to speak. “This is so new—I can’t—I’m sorry—” The words come out whispery and unconvincing.

But Ramesh gives a relieved laugh. “I understand completely. I don’t believe in forcing such things. I’d be happy to give you—us—time to get to know each other.”

We lie side by side after he switches off the lamp, careful not to touch. I’m tense all over, not sure I can trust him. I have heard too many stories from the aunties. But Ramesh talks in a slow, soft voice, pausing courteously from time to time for a response. He tells me about his work as an engineer, how much he loves it. How exciting it is for him to be faced with a problem to solve. The way he visualizes projects long before they come to pass, the lean, shining lines of a new track laid over terrain everyone else considers too difficult. The clean arc of a railroad bridge over a gorge that plummets into mists.

“There’s nothing like the sound a train makes as it passes over such a bridge—that giant, hollow, echoing sound. Maybe sometime I’ll take you with me so you can listen,” Ramesh says.

I nod. In the dim light that seeps up from the courtyard below, his eyes are still and shining, focused on my face.

“By the way,” he adds, very casually, “let’s not tell anyone about what we’ve decided tonight, okay?”

I want to laugh. It’s not as though I have an entourage of confidantes around me. But I know what he is really saying: If my mother-in-law knew of our platonic arrangement, we’d both be in a lot of trouble. Already I have overheard her telling several of
the admiring relatives at the wedding about her hopes for the imminent birth of the handsomest children the Sanyal family ever saw.

“All right,” I say. I will never love Ramesh—only toward one man can I feel that wrenching whirlwind emotion, soaring to heaven, flung down to hell, both at once. But our little conspiracy makes me feel we can be friends.

I LOVE
being married, as long as I don’t think too much about it. It’s like floating on a giant bed of cotton candy, incredibly light and pink and sweet, but with sudden hollows into which you can tumble any minute. And then the stickiness grabs hold and won’t let you up.

Being married is like what I imagine drinking wine to be, tipping up your head and letting the cool liquid pool into your mouth, a little bit of it trickling down your chin. And as long as you keep drinking, you’re safe from being hung over.

But why am I projecting shadows onto a landscape of sunshine? Sunil’s a most attentive husband. Almost every day he takes me someplace where we can be alone—so we’ll get to know each other, he says, before he has to return to America, leaving me behind to wait for my visa. We stroll around Victoria Memorial. We sit at the edge of Rabindra Sarobar, throwing petals into the water. When he describes America to me, it seems almost as amazing as the fairy kingdoms of Pishi’s tales. “You can be anything in America, Angel”—that’s his special name for me—he says excitedly. “You can be what you want.” Sitting there with my head on his shoulder, under the fragrant Hasnahana bushes with the sunlight making golden ripples on the lake, I believe him.

Marriage has changed me in unexpected ways. When I’m with Sunil, I’m like a dog with new puppies. I resent all intruders—and everyone is an intruder. When we visited my mother a couple of weeks after our wedding, as brides and grooms traditionally do,
I’m ashamed to say I had to work hard to hide my impatience. The house I’d always considered imposing seemed suddenly decrepit—it was as if I could hear the marble and mortar crumbling to pieces around me. And the mothers seemed smaller, shrunken, as if they were collapsing inward, into the void Sudha and I had left behind. When Pishi took Sunil away on the pretext of showing him the house so that Mother could ask me if he was treating me well, I was annoyed and answered in sulky monosyllables. How quickly my loyalties had shifted. Even if I’d had a problem with Sunil, I wouldn’t have told her. That was why I said yes so fast when she asked me if I liked my in-laws.

I do like Sunil’s mother. She’s truly good-hearted and very fond of Sunil. I know she’d have liked to spend more time with him during his short visit, but she never complains when Sunil goes off with me for the whole day, returning only a little before his father comes home from the office. She’ll happily make us a cup of tea and tell me stories about Sunil’s childhood, laughing as she remembers the time he almost set the kitchen on fire with his science experiment, or how afraid he used to be of spiders. At such times she looks beautiful.