The Story Hour (21 page)

I finish eating and puts the plate on table. I fighting with my eyes, because I wants them to stay open to watch ending of film and they wanting to be shut. For one minute, I let them win, and bas, I am sleeping sitting on sofa.

“Lakshmi.” Husband voice sound angry. “Wake up.”

“I's awake,” I say, rubbing my eyes, swallow my yawn. And then my eyes really open big.

Husband has put a towel on floor near me. On the towel is the pink plastic basin. Inside basin is steamy hot water. And also on towel is box of Epsom salts. “Here,” he say. “Put the feets inside this. It take down the swelling.”

But now it is my eyes who is swolled. With tears. “You make this for me?”

He give a short smile. “Who else?” he say, like he irritate, but I hears the pride in his voice.

Maybe angel not in this room. Maybe I dead and I in heaven. “Many thanks.”

“Mention not. Now, woman, you going to sit there and let water get cold?”

“No,” I say, slowly putting one feets in and then the next one. Within one-two minute, I feel the tired leaving my body.

Husband come sit next to me. “How it feel?” he ask.

“Like Taj Mahal and Las Vegas combo,” I say. “Tops.”

He look surprise and then he laugh. Pranab, one of his cardplayer friend, saying this every time he get good cards. “Lakshmi,” he say when he stop laughing. “You getting smart in your old age.”

The words slips from my mouth, as easy as a letter slip into a postbox. “Maybe if I get smart, you begin to love me.”

Hard to say who more shock, him or me. The words come out of my mouth but they not dead. They fly around in the room like pigeons and we too embarrass to look at them. “I just—” I begins, but he break in my words.

“Who say I don't love you?” he say in joking voice. “Woman, why you being stupid again?”

I know he trying to free me, to make me not feel embarrass. But now I wants to talk, to break this hard coconut shell we have lived inside for six years. I remembers how Maggie hold Sudhir babu's hand when he come home from work, and before I can stops myself, I pick up the husband's hand. But once I holding it, I not knowing what to do next. Keep it on his leg? Move it to mine? Hold it in air? He help me by putting both our hand on his knee. “Ji, I wants to say something,” I says. “I wants to say, I so sorry for what happened before. I knows you not loving me. It's okay. I knows you are a good man. You kind and honest. You deserve good wife. I sorry for how I destroy your life. If I return to earth in ten lives, I still not deserve your forgiveness. I's sorry.”

Six years these words living inside me, moving from my heart to my mouth, back into my heart. Why I not say them before? Maybe because I ascare, like I is right now. Without turning my head, I look at the husband. He not looking at me. One minute, two minute pass. I hears tick-tick of clock on the wall. Then he say, “No sense talking about past, Lakshmi. It was our destiny, bas. God's decision.”

We both looking at Raj Kapoor film still, but so many tears in my eyes, Raj Kapoor look like I seeing him from my windshield on a rainy day. What the right word? Blurty? Blurry. After a minute, husband get up from the sofa. “I need to tally day's receipts on the computer,” he say, but I know he making excuse to go leaf me. What I say upset him also.

I stay on sofa after he go into bedroom. Slowly, the water in the basin get cold, just like the cold that entering my heart.

M
AGGIE LOOKED AT
Lakshmi curiously, wondering if she'd ever seen the younger woman this upset or agitated. Lakshmi had called early this morning and asked whether she could come. “It is a Urgency,” she'd said. “If you have one hour, please to fit me in.”

Today was Maggie's day off from the hospital. She had planned on running errands this morning, before her first patient came in at two, but that would obviously have to wait. Unlike some of her patients, Lakshmi would not have called unless it was truly a crisis. “Yes, of course,” Maggie said. “Can you be here by ten?”

A brief pause and then Lakshmi said, “Yes. I suppose to help Rekha today, but she can manage alone.”

Now that Lakshmi was sitting on the leather chair in front of Maggie, she was strangely tongue-tied. She would start a sentence, stop, let it fade away. Begin again and then shake her head furiously, as if to deny the tears that kept filling her eyes.

“What is it?” Maggie asked again. “What's wrong? You said it was an emergency.”

“I . . . It is, Maggie. But not like that. What I saying is . . . It from before. Last night . . .”

“I don't under—”

“Maggie. I have to tell. A secret. Something bad I do.”

“Whatever it is—”

“But I cannot tell. Like this. I feeling your eyes on me. Please, can we go for short walk? Please.”

It was the end of February. There was no snow on the ground but it was still only thirty-eight degrees. Maggie's knee gave an involuntary stab at the thought of walking in the cold. But Lakshmi looked like she was going to collapse in the office if Maggie refused. “Okay,” she said shortly. “Let me go get my coat.”

At least the wind was low and the sun was out. Maggie crossed to the sunny side of the street, Lakshmi following closely. “Okay,” Maggie said. “You want to tell me what's going on?”

Tomato, the orange tabby from a few houses down, came down the driveway to rub against them, and Lakshmi bent to stroke him. When she got up, Maggie saw that her nose was red, but she couldn't tell if it was from the cold or if Lakshmi was crying. She decided to wait.

“Maggie. If I tell you a secret, do you promise not to bump me?”

“Bump you? What do you mean?”

Lakshmi looked impatient. “You know, bump me. Stop being my friend.”

Maggie bit down on her lip to suppress her laughter. “Oh. You mean dump you. Not bump.”

“Okay. But you promise?”

“What a ridiculous question, Lakshmi. Of course I won't stop being your friend. Or your therapist,” she added.

Lakshmi turned her head and stared at Maggie as they walked, looked at her for a long time as if gauging her, trying to decide something. Suppressing a sigh, Maggie put her hand on Lakshmi's shoulder. “My dear, whatever it is, you'll feel better after you tell me. Now, what is it?”

For the first time that morning, Lakshmi smiled. “Shilpa and I use to walk like this, with her hand on my shoulder. Ravi chaccha, who is oldest man in our village, use to bless us when we walk past his house. ‘May you two sisters always be this close, not only in this janam but the next life also.' And Maggie, I always use to think, Of course we be this close forever. We sisters, no? I never think day can come when I don't know if my Shilpa is dead or alive.”

“Is this—secret—about Shilpa?” Maggie asked softly.

“Yes. No. Yes. Maggie. Belief me when I say everything is about Shilpa. Even when I makes this big sin, it about Shilpa.” The tears rolled down Lakshmi's face. “Although to save my Shilpa, I kill someone else.”

They had arrived at the park at the bottom of the street, and Maggie gestured toward the lagoon. Apart from six or seven Canada geese, there was no one else there. “Want to walk around the lake?” she asked.

Lakshmi nodded. Because of the cold, they walked briskly, and by the time Lakshmi was done with her story, they were both a little out of breath.

I
T WAS THE
third and final day of the mela, and Lakshmi, Shilpa, and three of their friends were eating their second plate of pyali, the spicy concoction of chickpeas, onion, and boiled potatoes that all the girls loved. Flush with the monthly wages she'd just received from her bookkeeping job, Lakshmi was treating the other four. “Didi,” Shilpa gasped. “Can we have some sugarcane juice next? This is burning my mouth.”

“Arre, peanut.” Lakshmi laughed. “At least finish one thing before asking for something else.” She laughed again because it was a beautiful warm night, because the rain had held off, because there were three hours before the annual fair closed for the season, because she was here with her sister and her friends, and because she had money in her pocket. She tossed her head back at the inky night sky, whose stars had been overshadowed by the lights of the mela, but then her laugh caught in her throat and she frowned. Standing less than ten feet away from the group of girls was a man, a tall, dark-skinned, middle-aged man with scanty hair that he had combed forward onto his forehead. Even a quick glance told Lakshmi that there was something different about this man, something foreign, the cut of his blue shirt a little more stylish than that of the other men milling around, the cut of his hair a little less severe than the local people's. A foreigner in their midst. What made the laugh die in her throat was the intensity with which he was staring at them. Lakshmi turned her head involuntarily, to follow his line of vision, and realized with a start of outrage that he was staring at Shilpa, her baby sister, who was totally oblivious to his gaze, who was licking the last of the chickpeas off her lips in a manner that Lakshmi knew was innocent but also, she could see, could be mistaken for seductive. She felt a flash of anger toward the stranger, who was, she knew for sure, misreading her sister's innocent gesture, and who was staring at her with a boldness she found shocking. She moved her body a few inches, positioning herself between Shilpa and the man, blocking his view of her, and was rewarded by a glare. She glared back and the man looked startled, as if he'd just realized that she had caught him looking. He turned away hastily, and Lakshmi was about to turn away herself when she saw him talking to a man whom Lakshmi vaguely recognized.

She'd had enough. “Come on,” she said roughly, tugging at the sleeve of Shilpa's kurta. “Put that empty bowl down.”

“But Didi—”

“Didn't you hear? Let's go.”

Ignoring the complaints of their other friends, she hurried Shilpa along. “Where are we going? What's the rush?” Shilpa grumbled, but as always, she allowed herself to be led by her older sister.

“You said you wanted ganna juice, correct?” Lakshmi said, and knew she'd said the right thing when she heard Shilpa's squeal: “Yes.”

But when they got to the sugarcane juice stall, the man and his friend were there. Lakshmi felt a pinprick of apprehension. Did the man know them? Why was he following them? Why was he looking at them so boldly? What gave him the right? She wished her dada were here, but after accompanying them to the mela on the opening day, Dada had refused to go with them the next two nights. “You foolish girls, go,” he said. “I see everything there is to see first day only. Why for I want to go again?”

They had looked at their father in puzzlement, unable to explain the obvious—they wanted to go again and again because they'd had a great time on the first day and wanted to relive their pleasure: to eat more bhelpuri and other snacks, to ride on the Giant Wheel until it made them dizzy, to watch the actors in their makeup and costumes reenact parts of the Mahabharata, even though by the second day, they knew most of the dialogue by heart. It was the annual mela! It came only once a year. And it took them out of the sleepiness and hardship of their daily lives and jolted them awake with fun, music, games, excitement, lights, color, made them hear the buzzing of their youth, awakened their Bollywood dreams and made them seem possible. It connected them to the wider world because people from the surrounding villages also attended the mela, so in three days, they saw more people than they did in the rest of the year. Of course they would go back to the mela, squeezing from it every drop of color and excitement, so that their normal black-and-white lives came alive in reds and blues and greens for those three days.

Now Lakshmi felt her father's absence. Because the girls were almost done with their drinks, but the men lingered. She was amazed that none of the other four seemed to have noticed. The shameless man's eyes were almost sticking out of his head as he dirtied her beautiful sister with his looking. Again she situated herself between the two of them, feeling his eyes drilling holes into her walled back.

When she turned around again, they were gone. Lakshmi looked left and right, unable to believe her luck, but couldn't see them. Wait, now she spotted them, walking briskly away, the tall man in the blue shirt stooping slightly to hear what his friend was saying. “Go, go,” she said silently to herself. “Take your dirty rubbish somewhere else.”

“Ae, Didi, kya hua? What for you looking like you drinking sour milk? This juice is sweet, no?”

The other girls giggled, and Lakshmi allowed herself to be pulled out of her outrage. The man was a foreigner, obviously a city fellow. Lakshmi had heard that city people did not have good manners. Nobody had taught the stranger that men from good families did not stare at unknown women as if they wanted to . . . Lakshmi blushed and shook away the picture forming in her head.

“Let's go look at the stall where they selling bangles and all,” Shilpa said, and Lakshmi readily agreed.

By the time the fair ended that night, she had forgotten about the stranger and his rude foreign manners.

Her stomach lurched when she saw him again. Sitting next to Dada on the rope bed in front of the house. The late-afternoon sun glinting off the big gold watch that he wore. Lakshmi, who had come home after spending the day tending to Menon sahib's accounts, suppressed a shudder when she saw the thick wrist upon which the watch sat, and below it, the fat short fingers.

“Arre, beti, come,” Dada said. “Come, we have some good news to share.”

The man rose from the bed and folded his hands. “Namaste ji,” he said, a slight smirk playing on his lips, as if they were sharing a joke that excluded Dada.

Lakshmi gazed at Dada, who looked happier and less burdened than he had in years. Was this stranger a jadoogar, that he could make her father look ten years younger? She raised her eyebrow in silent inquiry at her father.