Sister of My Heart (45 page)

The inside of the airplane is quite beautiful, like something out of a movie, all plush maroon walls and shiny fixtures and air hostesses
with lacquered smiles. It is the moment I have dreamed of for weeks, but I am too curious to give it much attention. As soon as I settle Dayita with a pacifier, I tear open the brown packet.

Inside is a velvet jewelry box, and a note in Gouri Ma’s handwriting.
For our granddaughter
. I sigh, half-amused, half-vexed at the waste of money. It’s probably a pair of silver bell-anklets like the ones people are always giving babies. Pretty, but most impractical. As soon as I put them on Dayita, she’ll start chewing them.

But when I open the box, I gasp. For inside on a cushion of pale cream silk sits a necklace with a beautiful ruby pendant, shining with a red light that seems to well up from deep within it. It takes me a moment to realize that it is
the
ruby, the one that enticed Anju’s father and mine away from their families—one to his death, the other to murder. The last time I looked at it, the ruby had filled me with foreboding, but now, tamed by the lacy gold frame that binds it, it is merely beautiful. Is it because it has exacted sufficient suffering from us? The ancestral house of the Chatterjees is indeed reduced to rubble, and of its two daughters, one is childless and the other without a husband. Only Dayita, the sapling growing from the ruins, is untouched and strong with her infant power.

I slip the necklace over her head without hesitation.

“It’s your inheritance, baby,” I tell her. “Perhaps you can cleanse it of the film that has gathered around it, the sorrow and cruelty and greed.”

The crimson sparkle of the stone catches her eye, and she gives a gurgly laugh and tugs at it. But in a moment she is distracted by something far more fascinating—her socks. I smile as I watch her trying to pull them off. There is something marvelous about the way a jewel which had driven men to acts of folly and desperation lies forgotten on my daughter’s innocent chest.

But look, here is another packet in the carry bag. It is actually an envelope, a fat one. When I see my name printed in blocky
letters on it, a slow, swollen throbbing fills my head. It is the same writing that was on the envelope of money sent to me on the eve of my marriage. My father’s writing.

How did he manage to get this letter in here? Along with his murderous arts, had he learned wizardry as well? Or had he bribed someone in our household?

I want to throw the letter away unopened, but my curiosity is too great. So I give Dayita her bottle and rip open the envelope.

Dear daughter
, the letter begins. A shiver goes up my spine as I read the words. My body clenches with an old anger.
He has no right to call me that
. But I go on.

Dear daughter,

By the time you read this, you will be gone, and I will never see you again, for surely I will not live until you return from America—if you do indeed return. Knowing this gives me the courage to write my story, and to beg your forgiveness.

Some of my tale you have heard from your Pishi, though I doubt that the man she painted for you was really me. Who can know a man who lives, as I did, in camouflage? Not even he himself knows who he is.

Let me begin with the part no one else knows: the day we found the ruby cave. The day I thought of, briefly, as the happiest in my life, until events proved it to be the most disastrous.

By this time there were only three of us left in our party, your uncle Bijoy, I, and the man whose great-grandfather had originally discovered the rubies. Haldar (that was the name he gave us), a tall, wiry man with piercing eyes, had let the bearers go the day before. We were very close to the cave, and he didn’t want them to come any further. He didn’t trust them, he said. Had I been listening more carefully, I might have wondered if perhaps he didn’t trust us too. But I was crazy for the rubies and paid attention to little else.

At dawn that day we rowed the dinghy-boat from our launch to the edge of a mangrove swamp and entered the forest, sinking into the marshy ground with each step, hacking at the vines that blocked our way. From time to time Haldar consulted his compass and a little notebook he carried. I managed a look at it once, but it must have been written in some sort of code, for I couldn’t understand anything. In an hour we were covered with mud, exhausted, and not a little jumpy—for a number of the vines had turned out to be laudoga snakes, those whiplash-thin green creatures whose bite is said to be so instantly poisonous that no one even feels it. There was no question of stopping for rest—we had to get back to our boat by nightfall when, Haldar said, the tigers came out.

After a while the ground firmed, and Haldar took out the blindfolds and tied them over our eyes. We protested, saying this would slow us down further, that we were so lost in this forest already that we couldn’t even have found our way back to our boat. But he insisted. That had been the deal, and if we didn’t honor it, he was ready to turn back right then. So, blindfolded, we stumbled behind him, holding the end of a rope he’d tied to his waist, cursing as we bumped into each other or tripped over roots. After a while we could tell, by the change in the air, which was cooler now but musty and damp, that we had entered a cave. The path narrowed to a tunnel through which we had to crawl on our hands and knees—all our fancy safari clothing was in tatters by now—and then suddenly Haldar stood up and gave a gasp. I straightened up too and tore off my blindfold and saw that we were in a huge limestone cavern—so huge that the top of it receded into blackness. Haldar shone his flashlight onto the cavern wall nearest us, and we could see the rubies, embedded chunks that gleamed a dark rust color, like dried blood, against the chalky white. “Ten minutes,” whispered Haldar. “One ruby only.” We got down to our task silently—somehow it didn’t seem right to speak in such an awe-inspiring place. As soon as Bijoy and I had chiseled out our rubies, Haldar replaced our blindfolds. We returned the same way we’d come, falling, bruising ourselves over and over, but this time I didn’t feel any of it. I was too busy dreaming of how the ruby would change my life. How with it I would finally make your mother smile.

That night we ate well—Haldar had set a trap for fish before we’d left, and he made a fine mustard curry out of his catch—and we talked gaily of what we’d do with our newfound fortunes. But when your uncle and I lay down in the cabin—Haldar preferred to sleep outside, in the open air—Bijoy said, “Gopal, we have to talk.”

I was so exhausted I could barely keep my eyes open. “Can’t it wait till tomorrow?” I asked him. “I haven’t felt this sleepy in my life.”

“I’m tired too,” he said, “but no. Who knows what tomorrow will bring, whether any of us will be alive to see it.” There was something in his voice, at once anguished and stern, that made me shiver. I rubbed at my eyes and lit the kerosene lantern that we’d switched off. In its flickering light I could see the sadness on his face. With that my sleep fled, because I knew what he had discovered.

“You lied to us,” said Bijoy. “You’re not my cousin, are you?”

My mouth felt like a tinderbox, dry and flammable, which even a single word would set alight.

“I trusted you,” Bijoy said. The words went through me like a knife. All this time I hadn’t realized that I loved him more than I had ever loved any man. When he called me
brother
, a sweetness rose up in me. I couldn’t bear the thought of him never doing that again.

And so I told him what I’d sworn never to tell anyone—the truth about myself, though I was afraid that it might cause him to turn from me in disgust. The shameful truth of being a bastard in the house of my father, Bijoy’s uncle in Khulna. How he’d seduced my mother, a maidservant in his household, then sent her back to her family when she told him a baby was on the way. But her family wanted no part of the disgrace an unmarried mother would bring them. Poor as they were, they had their standing in their community. So my mother returned to Khulna, half-starved, bruised black from the beatings her brothers had given her.

Many women in her position would have despaired and thrown themselves into a well, but my mother was determined to live, and to make a life for me. She bribed the gateman of the big house with a pair of gold earnings the master had given her, the last thing of value she had left, and appeared in front of the master and his wife—who was also pregnant—as they sat at dinner. She threatened to kill herself if her position in the household wasn’t restored, and adequate provision made for her baby. Nor was she going to die silently and in secret. She’d set fire to herself in the marketplace and scream out the name of her betrayer with her last breath. And if the master hushed up the scandal with his money, she’d come back as a ghost and haunt his wife. Haunt her until she had a miscarriage, not just this time but every time she was pregnant. She swore this on the head of her unborn child.

How much of this talk would have swayed the master is uncertain, for he was known to be a hard man, but his frightened young wife begged him to give the maid what she wanted. She worked herself into such a hysterical state that finally the master grudgingly said that the maid could come back—but she’d have to work in the cow-barn, and sleep in the quarters above the barn, and never show her face—nor her son’s—to him.

That’s how my mother hacked out a precarious foothold in a house that wanted nothing of either of us. Life wasn’t easy for her as she lived out her days above the cow-barn. The other maids taunted her, and the men servants seemed to think, now that the master had discarded her, she was fair game for them. To protect herself she developed a stinging tongue and a reputation as a witch-woman—but I knew there was never any truth to that. She was ferocious in her protection of me, making sure that I was clothed and fed and sent to school, that no one forced me to do menial work. The children who teased me for being a bastard didn’t dare to do so in her hearing. “You’re as good as the master’s daughter that everyone makes such a fuss over,” she always said to me. Still, she couldn’t protect me from the furious shame that filled me, nor the ravenous desire for revenge, especially after she died from a fever because no doctor would come to treat her.

I ran away from the cow-barn soon after, before the master had a chance to throw me out. Anger ate into me, anger that the world had cheated me of what had been my right. I spent my days planning vengeance—maybe I would burn the big house down, or abduct my half-sister and sell her to the flesh-merchants. But fortunately for me (for otherwise I’d have lived out my life in the city’s jail) the partition occurred. The master lost everything in the riots and fled with his family. And though I’ve heard the daughter came back, after things quieted down, all that was left of her father’s fortune by then was the ruined shell of the house I’d both hated and coveted.

The partition cut me loose from any ties I had in Khulna, and I decided to seek my fortune. I would become an adventurer. Why not? The revenge I hadn’t been able to wreak on my father I would exact on others. Somehow or other, the world would pay for what it owed me. That was the way I thought when I fooled your mother into marrying me and cheated my way into Bijoy’s house—and his heart. Except I hadn’t realized that he would find his way into my heart too.

When I finished my story Bijoy was silent for a long time. Then he put his arm around me. “You are indeed my cousin, whatever the world might say,” he told me. Though he said nothing more, I knew he felt for my childhood and forgave me my deceit. And that we would never need to bring this up again.

Something changed in me when Bijoy put his arm around my shoulder. The great burden of pretending to be someone that I was not fell from me, and with it a certain bitterness. If Bijoy could accept me in spite of my shortcomings, if he could see something worth loving in me, perhaps I could too. This would be the treasure—more precious than a hundred rubies—with which I’d start my new life.

As I thought this, the fever of discontent that had plagued me for so many years lifted from my heart, and I fell into a deep, drugged sleep.

I use the word
drugged
intentionally, daughter, for I am sure now that that is what Haldar did to us. I am not sure why he waited until this time to harm us—probably it was so that he could add our rubies to the three to which the ancient warning had restricted him. He must have put something in the mustard-fish, some paralyzing herb, perhaps, for though I wondered at the sounds I heard in my sleep—the engine starting, the waves increasing as the launch made its way to the middle of the river, the thud, the splash that followed it—I was unable to open my eyes. Even when I felt his hands on me, searching my waistband for the pouch holding the ruby, I couldn’t move. Only after he heaved me over the side of the launch into the water did panic break through my frozen muscles. The current was strong, and the bobbing outline of the launch was already beginning to recede. I searched the ink-black water frantically for Bijoy but saw nothing. I hoped the water had revived him, too—I didn’t know then that he couldn’t swim.

Finally I realized that if I was to get back to the launch, I’d have to stop searching and start swimming back. Already my tired muscles were cramping. It took me a long time to make it back to the boat. Luckily, Haldar was so certain of the effectiveness of his drug that he hadn’t bothered to take the launch upriver—if he had, it surely would have been the end of me. But perhaps
luckily
is the wrong word. Maybe it would have been better if I too had drowned that night like my brother.