Sister of My Heart (46 page)

I climbed up over the side of the launch as quietly as I could. Haldar was hunched near a lantern—gloating over the rubies, no doubt. I was on him before he had a chance to look up. I gripped him around the throat, but he was strong and slammed me into the deck. Then he threw the lantern at my face. I could hear the sizzling sound my flesh made as the glass broke. Pain exploded across my forehead, worse than anything I’d known. That’s when my hand found the grappling hook. I swung it at Haldar with all the rage of my misshapen, misfortunate life and heard him scream as it knocked him over the side.

I pause my reading here. My lungs have turned to stone—I cannot breathe. The fire, the burned face. No, it cannot be. But I must continue reading.

I had no time to think of what I’d done—but I wouldn’t have been sorry even if I had. The shattered lantern had started a fire on the deck. I tried to put it out but it was too powerful. The dinghy was my only chance. As I rowed away, I heard the launch exploding behind me, but I had no time to look. I maneuvered the dinghy toward the spot where I thought Bijoy had been thrown overboard. It was frustratingly slow—I wasn’t skilled at rowing and the current was strong. I searched and searched, weaving back and forth across the black water, swinging the lantern, calling his name, battling the pain that raked my face. But there was no sign of a body, living or dead. Finally, after the sun came up and I could see how fast the current swept past the prow of the dinghy, I gave up. I rowed the dinghy ashore and fell, unconscious, on the marshy ground. I had no money or papers—Haldar had taken them, just as he must have taken Bijoy’s. As for the rubies, they must have sunk, along with the exploded boat, to the bottom of the river.

I came to consciousness in a nearby village—the adibasis had found me and taken me there. Their ojha did what he could for me with root and herbs. It relieved the pain, but when I looked into a mirror and saw the gouges and scabs, the loathsome crisped-away pinkness, the monstrosity my face had become, I shuddered and flung the mirror from me with all my strength.

I should have contacted the police then, but I was too distraught to think straight. I’d killed one man, and if the police charged me with Bijoy’s death too, how could I prove my innocence? In one sense I
was
guilty of it—hadn’t I been the one to show him the ruby and tempt him to this ill-fated adventure? I couldn’t stand the thought of going back to Bijoy’s house, empty-handed, ugly beyond imagination, bearing the worst possible news, to face the condemnation in the eyes of the three widows.

So I disguised myself as a refugee—it wasn’t so far from the truth, after all—and made my way down to Calcutta by begging on the trains. I slept on the platform of Sialdah station and agonized over how I would approach the women, what I could possibly say to them. Then I saw the obituary in the papers—for Bijoy and for me.

The announcement gave me a strange sensation—frightening, almost—of having ceased to exist. But it also brought me a certain release. No longer father or husband or cousin, I felt I could once more invent whom I wanted to be.

Coward that I was, I told myself matters had been decided for me. It would be less painful for the women to believe that we had both died. Seeing me would only cause them to remember Bijoy and to regret that I hadn’t been taken instead of him. So I found a job in a car mechanic’s garage, wore a turban and grew a beard, took on a false name and learned to drive. The money was good, the labor punishing enough that I could sleep at night. Soon I’d saved enough to start a business in a new town, forget my past once and for all. I went—several times—but each time a restlessness I could not understand forced me to return to Calcutta.

Then one day I heard that the Chatterjee women needed a driver, and I found myself standing at the old gate which had closed behind me five years ago, offering to work for whatever they could afford to pay. That is how I became Singhji.

Singhji
, I whisper.
Singhji
. It is a sound from a forgotten language whose meaning I cannot decipher. But there is more.

At first I kept my distance from the mothers and spoke as little as I could, afraid I might be discovered. But soon I realized that there was no reason to fear that. People rarely recognize things they are not expecting to see, even when they’re right in front of their eyes. And in many ways, I was not Gopal anymore. My frivolousness had been burned away in the fire that night, my vanity and my need to assume importance. What was left was regret, and the realization that through my own wrong choice my family was lost to me forever. The only way I could be with them now was as their servant.

Through the years I watched your mother and you, the two I loved most in that house. I was anguished by your mother’s bitter greed, because I knew the part I had played in changing her from the lovely young woman who had stolen my heart by the riverside. Watching you grow into a kind and beautiful girl, I felt exquisite joy—and sorrow too, because I would always be a stranger to you, unable to protect you from your mother’s broken dreams. I tried vainly to steer you toward happiness. I admired and anguished over the choice you made so Anju could marry the man she loved. Finally, before your marriage, I gathered all the savings I’d been accumulating since your birth for this occasion and mailed them to you.

But the shock in your eyes as you opened the package taught me that only the good are blessed with the ability to give. How painful it was for me to have to drive your Pishi to Kalighat and watch her give every paisa away to beggars. It was then I realized that, having given up my identity, I’d become like the viewer of a movie who weeps for the characters on the screen but cannot help them. Or was it I who was the character, trapped in the tale I’d fabricated?

On the way back from Kalighat, I gathered up my courage to ask your Pishi as casually as I could what this money was which she’d given away. She told me it was ill-gotten gains, belonging to a murderer who’d destroyed the Chatterjee family through his greed. I guessed then at the story she must have surmised for you out of half-truths, and was shaken at the thought of the hatred you must feel for me. On that day I promised myself that when the time was right I would tell you the whole story and relieve you of the burden of guilt and hate you’ve carried all these years.

So, Sudha, here is my gift, the only one I have left to give: You are not the daughter of a murderer—not in the sense you’ve feared all these years.

My one request is that you not tell the mothers who I am. It is too late for that to do us any good, and it will snatch from me the only comfort I possess: that of helping them through the twilight of our lives. And truly, Gopal died long ago, in that night of fire and water, and I am Singhji.

I wish for my granddaughter all the luck that passed me by. I am thankful that I was able to hold her in my arms these few months. I hope when she is old enough, you will tell her the story of her grandfather so she will not repeat his errors. I hope she will be able to love him a little.

I press my knuckles hard against my teeth and welcome the pain. I am caught between sorrow and relief and incredulity. Singhji—my father? I cannot even begin to imagine how he must have felt day after day, salaaming to the mothers and even to us, obediently following orders, the nobleman of an old tale, disguised as the servant. Only in his case, it was a disguise he would never be able to remove. A memory of eyes comes back to me as I think of my father: eyes in their scarred sockets gazing at me in the rearview mirror, noble eyes, sorrowful eyes, eyes enigmatic with a love he knew he could not express, nor I understand. If there is one thing his story has taught me, it is that when all the dross is melted away from the human heart, only gold remains.

Dayita gives a sudden wail, and thankfully I turn to tend to her. I take refuge in the simple acts of motherhood which allow me to push back the letter and its implications into that dark recess where I have stored all the experiences of my life which I have not dared to examine fully. I am afraid they will scorch me beyond recognition, like the girl in a story I once heard, who opens a forbidden door to find blazing behind it the chariot of the Sun God.

But here now is a wondrous thought that has just risen inside me like the sun after a stormy night: If my father did not kill Anju’s, then I need no longer carry the guilt which has been with me so long that I have forgotten it once was not a part of me. I need not pay her back with my life for the one her father lost. I examine this idea cautiously, gingerly, as one fingers a newly formed scab to test the healing underneath. And this is what I discover: My feelings toward Anju have not changed. If anything, they are purer, more intense because they are no longer dictated by necessity. I love her because I love her.

By now I have changed Dayita and burped her and rocked her back and forth, but she decides she does not like the airplane anymore. She makes her arms and legs as rigid as she can—it’s a new trick she’s learned, a most effective one—and screams until
her face turns red and passengers crane their necks to see what I am doing to the poor child. I offer her my breast, but she refuses to let me off so easily. Finally, because I do not know what else to do, I begin to whisper a story into her ears. Amazingly, she starts to quiet—she is still crying, but they are soft sobs now. And that is how, poised in the sky between our new life and our old one, the life we cannot yet imagine and the one we’ve already begun to forget, I tell her a tale to make her heart strong, to graft her life onto. For of all things in this world it seems to me that that is what women most need. I tell her the story—once again—of the Queen of Swords. But as I speak it changes and is no longer the story I told Anju.

I tell her how the Queen of Swords was born an ordinary girl, I tell of her marriage and pregnancy, of how the palace guards tried to destroy the girl baby in her womb. How the unborn daughter gave her mother the courage to leave, gave her the flaming swords made of light so that none dared prevent her from going.

I tell her of the queen’s desperation, after her baby was born, when no one dared to give them refuge. How she wandered in many lands with her daughter, until finally she found herself at the ocean’s edge, with no place else to go.

“Then,” I continue, “she heard a voice saying, ‘Mother, don’t weep.’ She looked and it was her daughter, speaking her first words. The child knelt and touched the swords, and when she did so, they became as one and turned into a silver bird. Its eyes were made of rubies, and its wings shimmered like dual rainbows. The queen and her daughter climbed onto its back, and the bird began to carry them to a new life in a new land.
We’ll be happy ever after
, the queen wanted to whisper to her daughter as they flew, but she knew that was not true. Life never is that way. And so instead she held her daughter in silence, heart to heart, and as they traveled each heart drew on the other’s strength, so that when they reached their destination they would be ready.”

Dayita is asleep when I finish, her limbs loose and trustful.
How wondrous the way her head fits into the crook of my elbow. I have a cramp in my arm but I do not set her down. I hold her like this for a long time, listening to her breathe. The main lights of the plane have been turned off, and in the shadows the ruby on her chest rises and falls with a tiny glimmer, like a bird’s eye.

I’VE ALWAYS
thought of myself as an impatient person. It’s one of the things Pishi used to scold me about when I was a girl. But now I realize that all this time I never knew what true impatience meant. Even those ecstatic early days with Sunil were nothing compared to what I’ve been going through this week. I can’t sit still. I have no interest in food. But for the first time in my life I’ve been cooking feverishly until the refrigerator is crammed with all the dishes I remember Sudha liking. Which is crazy because she can cook them ten times better than I can. I’ve also selected a few American dishes—spaghetti sauce, apple pie, potato salad—my repertoire is admittedly meager. It’ll be a good way to start explaining to Sudha about life in this country.

When I mentioned this to Sunil, he was clearly annoyed. “For heaven’s sake,” he said. “You’re not her teacher—or her keeper. She’ll learn on her own.”

I shouldn’t have brought it up—he’s been increasingly edgy and irritable whenever I speak of Sudha. And since I discovered the handkerchief I’m awkward too, so whatever I say comes out sounding stilted or overly enthusiastic. Still, once in a while, I
have
to talk about her when the longing to have her here shudders through me like the hot flashes that used to hit me in the first nights since Prem died.