Sister of My Heart (5 page)

“Oh, she was beautiful, your mother,” says Pishi. “Maybe the most beautiful woman I’d seen, though recently it seems to me that you’ve surpassed her. Even on that day, with the dust of Calcutta lying like a veil over her face, and wilted like a lotus flower plucked and left too long in the sun, she could turn a man’s head. Yet how docile she seemed as she followed me, docile and a little stunned. How full of young wonder when I showed her to her room and explained how the switch to the ceiling fan worked, and the flush toilet. But that was to change soon.”

I imagine the years passing my mother by as she sits on the high four-poster bed, staring out through the window grills at the passing vendors calling their wares outside her room. But it is not really her room, just as the peacock-silk bedspread is not hers, nor the saris she wears, or the jewelry. She cannot even claim the food she eats as rightfully hers, earned by her own husband. She
is here on charity, a poor cousin by marriage, and even though the barababu and his wife are truly kind and welcoming, even though the widow-lady, his sister, takes her everywhere she goes—the market, the temple, the
jatra
performances of tales from the
Mahabharat
—the truth of her situation gnaws at her endlessly. She feels cheated, and as each year rolls like karma’s iron wheel toward its end, the lines of discontent take over her face like spiderwebs do an abandoned house. She begins to nag at her husband more and more.
Are you ever going to make any money, when are we going to move into our own home, where are all your fine promises now
, hai
Mother Kali, this is my punishment for following this man, for smearing black on my ancestors’ faces
.

“Your father was a dear man,” says Pishi, “but not lucky in matters of money. It was as though the Bidhata Purush, having given him good looks and charm enough for two, felt he had received his due. Oh, he had great ideas, Gopal, but they were like unbaked clay pots. You went to fetch water, lowered them into the lake, and all you were left with was mud on your hands. That’s how it was with the handmade perfume factory he proposed, the radical newspaper he wanted to run. He would go to Bijoy for the capital, promising big things.
This time it’ll work, I know it, Biju Da, I’ll return you double money within two months
. Bijoy was always happy to help. He was a generous man, my brother. Too generous sometimes, we told him, your Gouri Ma and I, but he wouldn’t listen. He just said, ‘What’s the good of money, Didi, if I can’t use it to make my own brother’—that’s how he thought of your father—‘happy. By God’s grace, don’t we have enough?’

“ ‘Not really,’ Gouri would say. ‘Have you seen the accounts this month?’ Even in those days she was the clear-eyed one, fooled by little. She would point out how the bookstore was running at a loss, and how Harihar the nayeb hadn’t sent the full revenues from the village, claiming that the paddy prices had fallen again. ‘You’ve got to go and check on him,’ she said. ‘He’s stealing from us with both hands.’

“But Bijoy would just smile his gentle smile and say, ‘Gouri, where’s your trust? Hari Kaku has been with our family for thirty years. He used to carry me around on his shoulders when I visited the village as a little boy. He would never do a thing like that.’

“ ‘If he’s so honest,’ Gouri would say, her face reddening, for she hated that anyone should take advantage of her husband’s generous heart, ‘he shouldn’t mind you asking a question or two, checking his facts and figures with other people.’

“Bijoy would shake his head. ‘I can’t go snooping around for the sake of a few rupees, Gouri,’ he’d say. ‘It would be an insult to Hari Kaku. We Chatterjees have never done things like that.’ His voice would still be soft, but firm also, and final, so that your mother knew there was nothing to be gained by arguing. In any case, she believed that a woman’s first duty was to support her husband.

“She was the perfect wife, your aunt Gouri, and her perfection was beautiful because it sprang from a source of goodness deep in her heart. I admired her greatly for it, and envied her a little too. But later I would wish it had not been that way. If she had fought with Bijoy, if she had wept and sulked and threatened and charmed, like ordinary women do with the men they love, perhaps he would still be alive.

“Deep within himself Bijoy must have known Gouri was right, that the fortunes of the Chatterjee family were like a moon spinning toward eclipse. I think that is why he agreed with your father about the ruby cave.

“But first came the pregnancies.

“We were all pleased when Gouri and Nalini became pregnant within weeks of each other, but Bijoy was overjoyed. He had been wishing for a child ever since he was married, seven years ago, and he took the double pregnancy as a miracle of sorts, further proof of the good luck Gopal brought to the house. He showered the two women with gifts—of equal value, that’s the kind of man he was—and made sure the baidya came
each month to check on their progress. Special food was prepared for them, whatever their hearts desired. When your mother, who had not been doing too well, took a fancy for mangoes in the winter, Bijoy sent all the way to Hogg’s market, where the sahebs shopped, to get a dozen of them at an exorbitant price. He wanted her to be happy.”

But my mother was not happy, and she no longer attempted, as she had done early in her marriage, to hide it. Nor did she care that an unhappy mother is said to pass on her sorrow to the baby in her womb. For with the onset of her pregnancy, a strange desperation had come over her. As her waist thickened and her feet grew swollen, as her only treasure, her beauty, disappeared within the bloated sack she saw her body turning into, she felt that her one chance at life was over. Things would only get worse now. She was doomed to grow old and die in the borrowed room she had lived in for the last three years. And thus her tirades grew worse.
Are you a man or a ground-crawling insect?
she would shout at my father.
How long are you going to beg your daily food from your cousin-brother, just because he is kind? Running after no-good schemes like a dog chasing his shadow. Why can’t you get a job in an office like all the other men? Chee chee, don’t you see how even the servants look at us, with no respect in their eyes, how they whisper about us in the kitchens?
And finally
, If the baby knew what kind of father he had, he too would be ashamed. He would rather die than be born to you
.

For a while my father would have tried to ignore her. She didn’t really mean it. Everyone knew how pregnant women were. Water spouted from their eyes for no reason, and flame from their tongues. He would sit on the terrace after dinner and play on his flute while Bijoy listened, and the darkness would be cool against his skin, cool and calm and deep, the water of a black lake that extended out forever, and the high notes of the flute would be perfect ripples on its satin surface.

But the part about the baby—ah, that stung, as though someone had wound him around and around in poisonous bichuti
vines. So that one morning he left, very early, before even the servants were awake, and was gone for three days. And just when a frantic Bijoy was about to inform the inspector saheb at the police station that his brother was missing, he returned. With the ruby.

“The sun was setting when he flung open the gate and hurried up the gravel driveway,” says Pishi, “and its last rays caught his disheveled hair in a brown halo. A two-day stubble covered his face, and his clothes—the same he had worn when he left the house—were crumpled and muddy. But his eyes—they glittered in his face with such intensity—like he was a prophet, or maybe a madman. He was laughing as he shouted for us all to come and see what he had with him.”

Rolled across his palm the ruby must have sparkled like fire and ice together, like a teardrop wept by Jatayu, the mythical dragon-bird. It was so large that all who saw it drew in their breath in sharp amazement, and even my mother was silent while he told the household about the cave.

“He’d met a man, said Gopal, though he would not tell us where or how or his name either, a man who knew of a cave deep in the jungles of Sundarban where a million rubies such as these grew from the walls. His great-grandfather had been told of the cave by a sannyasi he’d met while on pilgrimage. He had found the place and chiseled three stones from it, and on his return had them polished by the finest jewelers in Calcutta. Yes, this stone that we were passing around in amazed silence was one of them.

“ ‘Why three?’ Gouri asked, frowning.

“ ‘That was all that was allowed by the demons who guarded the cave, the sannyasi had warned,’ Gopal replied, and by his laugh you could tell he did not believe in such warnings. He went on to tell us that over the years the ruby-finder’s family had come upon one misfortune after another until they’d had to sell the other two rubies—but this one, the loveliest of them all, they’d
held on to. Now, though, they faced disaster unless they sold this last one too—or unless the great-grandson could find the cave again.

“ ‘And can he?’ Bijoy asked eagerly, as though he really believed this story, which sounded to me as if it had been lifted from a book of old tales.

“ ‘He thinks he can,’ said Gopal. ‘His great-grandfather left directions, but he warned the family that the caves were cursed and the guardians easily angered. They were not to undertake such a journey unless the family were in the direst straits. But now they are, and the great-grandson is prepared to take the risk. What he needs, though, is a partner, a man of honor and adventure, a man who can raise the money needed for the expedition.’

“ ‘How much?’ asked Bijoy.

“I was surprised that he would even consider such a crazy scheme, and looking at Gouri, I saw that she was too. There was something else in her eyes which I’d rarely seen—fear. She crossed her hands over her belly—she was in her eighth month—and pressed her lips together to keep in all the things I knew she wanted to say.

“ ‘A hundred thousand rupees,’ said Gopal, his voice like a child’s who has run all the way home.

“ ‘A hundred thousand?’ Gouri burst out incredulously.

“ ‘Yes, I know it’s a lot,’ Gopal said. ‘It’s because he’ll have to pay the bearers extra to go into that forest—they believe it’s haunted. He’s willing to leave the ruby with us for surety—we can have it evaluated by any jeweler we choose. He says it’s worth more than what we loan him. On his return he’ll pay us back double the money.

“ ‘I told him I thought I could raise the money—but only if he let me come with him. If he let me get my own rubies. Then he wouldn’t owe me anything.

“ ‘We bickered back and forth, and finally we agreed that I’d go with him. I’d let myself be blindfolded the last part of the
journey, and I’d bring back only one ruby. Even then, brother, a ruby like this one—can you imagine how much that would be worth? Enough for me to repay you—not that I ever could, in my heart—for all these years you’ve been taking care of me. Enough for Nalini and me to start a new life in our own home. Brother, please say you’ll loan me the money.’

“ ‘And Bijoy, my gentle, conscientious brother, who had never traveled more than a hundred miles outside of Calcutta, who had never expressed any desire of doing so, said, ‘I will if I can come with you. If I can bring back a ruby too.’

“Oh, chaos broke loose then, myself and Gouri crying,
Are you mad? It’s some kind of a trick, can’t you see? And even if it weren’t, it sounds terribly dangerous
. And
Where will you get money like that, anyway
, and
How can either of you think of leaving at this time, there’s no more than a month left for the babies to come
. Only later did I realize that Nalini hadn’t said a word.

“ ‘Please, Didi, Gouri, calm yourselves,’ Bijoy had said, and when I heard his voice I knew his mind was made up. Gouri must have heard it too, for she left the room then, weeping, though she’d never been one for tears, and took to her bed and did not come down for the night meal. But Nalini’s eyes shone as they hadn’t in a long while, and she ate well, and while she ate she asked many questions.

“News of all this spread like flames in wind—with servants, it’s never any other way. In the telling the ruby grew to be big as a pigeon egg, the cave became a treasure house of the jinns, and the stranger was a magician, a jadukar who’d mesmerized the two brothers, surely, for although Gopal Babu had always been crazy, Bijoy Babu had too much sense to believe such things. And yet, and yet—the eyes of the tellers would take on a faraway look at this point—what if there
were
such a cave, what if the brothers
did
bring back those rubies—and anyone could see that they wished they were going too.”

I think I understand how my father felt, and my uncle. And
even my mother with her sudden-sparkling eyes (though always it is her I know the least, less even than the two men whom I have never seen). For each of them, in a different way, it was a last opportunity.

The cave of rubies would allow my father to redeem himself with his wife and his brother—yes, he too thought of Bijoy this way, he was surprised to discover, and not merely as the rich cousin to whom he was beholden. Ah, when did this change, which he had never intended, occur? When had he begun to love them both, to want them to look on him with admiring eyes?

For my uncle, the only son of the Chatterjees, trapped since birth in the cage of propriety, it was the one chance at a life of adventure. At a life which had seemed to him until now as remote and impossible, as holy—yes, that was the word—as that of fairy tale princes on a magic quest. How could he let it pass? His hand was steady as he signed the papers pawning the family lands—even their country mansion—to raise the needed money. When Gouri Ma protested, reminding him that the house had been owned by the Chatterjees for more generations than anyone remembered, he held her hands tightly and assured her he would get it back before the year was out. The hunger in his eyes stopped her from saying anything more. She knew what he was thinking ahead to: The way he would sit, years from now, in the purple Calcutta twilight, speaking of it all to his sons—and their sons as well. The look of wonder on the young faces, adoration such as he had never hoped for.