The Story Hour (25 page)

Lakshmi shook her head as if she could hear the old man's voice. “Everyone become very hush, then. Husband's father look to me and say, ‘Come, beti, come touch my feet and take my blessing.' ‘Baba, you not following,' my husband say. ‘This is not the woman I plan to marrying.'

“‘No, this is woman God planning for you to marry,' my father-in-law say. ‘In our family in a thousand years, no man ever leaf his wedded wife. Now you want to leaf this girl? What will happen to her if you do? All these people will bite at her flesh like wild dogs. I will not allow it.'

“‘But Baba—'

“The old man bang his walking stick. ‘You call me father but still you arguing with me? Is this your training in Am'rica? This is your kismet, beta. You cannot run from your kismet.'

“And what you think, Maggie? Husband look down at his feet and say, ‘Yes, Baba. You correct.'”

Again, Maggie felt that distaste. Was Lakshmi valorizing a crazy old fool who had sold his son's happiness because of some antiquated notion of family honor? She had never felt as distant from Lakshmi as she did right now. “So that was it? Adit listened to his father?”

“Yes. Of course, his sister still angry at us. Go up to Dada and asking back for everything they give us. I say to her she can have the gold jewelry right now, at the wedding, only. But for sari I'm wearing, she has to wait until tomorrow.”

“What happened after the reception?”

“Husband and I goes to hotel for honeymoon. He leaf me alone in hotel room and say he going to bar. Until then, I never stay alone even one day. He not return to room until three in the morning. He come in the room and go to sleep on the sofa.” Lakshmi stopped walking. “That was my honeymoon. Next day, he drive me to Dada's house. Drop me near the house only. I wanting so much to explain, to say sorry, but it like talking to stone building. I's so ascare, I say nothing.”

“Well, you can't blame him, I suppose.” The words slip out of Maggie's mouth. “I mean, I can't imagine his reaction . . .”

Lakshmi looked at Maggie closely. “That only I'm trying to tell you, Maggie. That our marriage not his fault. I know you not liking my husband. And I explaining to you, he not a bad man. We has a paper marriage. Not real ones, like you and Sudhir baba. My husband love my sister, not me.”

Maggie blinked, ashamed of her reaction, of the understanding she saw in Lakshmi's eyes. It was a gamble Lakshmi took, she realized, telling her this sordid story. She had risked losing the only friend she had in America, so that Maggie would stop judging her husband harshly. This is another sacrifice in a long line of sacrifices. When will this woman ever learn to live for herself?

“I . . . I don't know what to say, Lakshmi,” Maggie said. “That is, I feel sorry for both of you. You know?”

Lakshmi turned her head slightly to face Maggie and smiled. “I knows, Maggie. That's why only I wanted to tell you.” She continued to look at Maggie in a curious manner, as if bracing herself for rejection but hoping for something different, some assurance, some gesture to show that nothing had altered between them. Maggie knew this but was frozen, unable to provide the absolution that Lakshmi wanted. She felt as if Lakshmi had told her a story from medieval times, something so primitive and ridiculous that she could not wrap her mind around it. She had heard scores of lurid stories from her in-laws, but she had never known any of the characters involved. Until now.

Desperate to get away, she looked around the lagoon, hoping to run into somebody she knew. She longed to glance at her watch, wanted more than anything to be able to say, “I'm afraid our time is up for today,” but knew that would seem too obvious. As they walked, Maggie became aware that she was angry. She was slipping. Usually, this was the kind of information she would've coaxed out of her client by the third or fourth session. Had her distaste for Lakshmi's husband blinded her to the situation?

“Why are you telling me this now?” she asked. She could hear the cold, raw quality in her own voice. “I mean, why now, after all this time?”

Lakshmi was quiet for so long that Maggie started to repeat the question. Then the younger woman spoke. “Yesterday, when I gets home, my feets is very tired. They paining me. The husband goes and gets the warm water for me to soaks them.”

Maggie felt as if Lakshmi had presented her a riddle and expected her to solve it. So the guy gave her a warm soak. So what? “So?” she said cautiously. “What about that made you decide to tell me?”

Lakshmi took Maggie's hand in hers, an unconscious gesture that warmed Maggie's heart despite the coldness she felt. “I is sorry, Maggie,” she said. “I know I should have told you sooner. But what to do? I was so ashame to tell. Also, I's ascare that you would bump me if you knows.”

This was the opening to reassure Lakshmi that she intended to do no such thing, that their relationship would survive this revelation, that she understood the social and economic pressures that had driven her to such a drastic solution. In fact, this could be a teaching moment—she could say something about patriarchal societies such as India (though she wouldn't use the term “patriarchy”); could point out that it was Lakshmi's lowly status as a woman that had led her to this end; could discuss the unfairness of a dowry system that penalized a woman for being born a woman, punished a father for having a daughter instead of a son.

But she didn't. Couldn't. She opened her mouth, and no words of consolation, or solidarity, or empathy emerged. The moment passed. The silence between them stretched. In that silence, Maggie pulsed with awareness of their differences rather than their similarities. At their first meeting, she had been struck by how much they had in common: their marriages to Indian men, the early death of their mothers. Now she was aware of how superficial those similarities were. And how vast the chasm that separated them—education, language, nationality, race. It was laughable to think they could ever be friends. It was Lakshmi who had willed their friendship into being. As for Maggie, she had mistaken sympathy, affection, and pity for friendship.

Lakshmi was looking at her expectantly, but this made Maggie even more unwilling to respond. Enough. She had done enough for this woman walking beside her. She had bent the rules of their professional relationship to such a degree that the rules scarcely existed; she had taught her to drive; she had permitted her into her home and allowed her to mingle with her friends; she had helped her earn a steady income. All this because she had seen Lakshmi as a victim, as a helpless immigrant woman trapped in a loveless marriage to a dour, domineering man. Now she understood that it was Adit Patil who was the true victim, that it was he who was trapped in a marriage to a woman he was not attracted to, all because of his father's twisted sense of honor. And now Lakshmi was seeking absolution, as if it were Maggie's forgiveness to grant, as if she could dispense grace as easily as a Catholic priest.

No. In the church where she had spent her childhood, grace was neither cheap nor free. It had to be earned, and the earning was not easy. She came from a hardy, stoic, marginalized people to whom nothing was given for free, not even forgiveness. Although Maggie seldom thought of that little storefront church where she had spent so much of her childhood, she thought of it now. She had been much too lenient with Lakshmi. She had allowed the younger woman to blithely break down the professional barriers between them; had allowed her to set the ground rules; had gone along with her strange requests. And in the process, Lakshmi had taken her for a ride over an entire year.

She was dimly aware that her reaction was a little extreme, that it had deeper echoes than her conscious brain was registering. That beneath her outrage at Lakshmi, there hid another outrage—at her own betrayal of her husband's blind faith in her. Perhaps, buried even deeper, was an older, more potent emotion—the helpless, unexpressed outrage of a little girl, too young to articulate or understand her father's violation of her trust.

She was too comfortable in her anger to process this. It felt good, this clean, undiffused anger, so much easier than the heavy combination of sympathy and responsibility that had colored all her interactions with Lakshmi. She had spent so much of her professional and personal life trying to understand people, to make excuses for bad behavior, her life governed by what Sudhir termed her “on-the-other-hand-ism.” It was freeing to step out of the gray and into the black and white.

“What you thinking, Maggie?” Lakshmi asked. There was a trembling quality in her voice, and it pulled Maggie out of the vortex of anger she was slipping into.

“I was thinking . . .” she began, but then her left hand involuntarily raised itself, and she glanced openly at her watch. “. . . that it's time to get home. I can't be late for my other clients,” she added unnecessarily.

“Yes. Of course. Sorry.”

They walked in silence up the trail that led them away from the lagoon. Seven more minutes and we will be home, Maggie thought. Thank God I have some time to myself before the next appointment.

Beside her, Lakshmi spoke so softly that Maggie didn't hear what she said. “Excuse me?” she said. She glanced at Lakshmi, and despite herself, her heart pinched at the sorrow she saw on the brown face.

“I saying that the worse part of all this is, it take my Shilpa away from me,” she repeated.

“You mean because you left for the U.S.?”

Lakshmi shook her head. “No. I means even before that. When I was still living in my dada's house, waiting for the visa to come.”

Maggie hated herself for asking but she did. “Why? Where did Shilpa go?”

“Nowheres. Her body is still staying with us. But her heart was gone.” Lakshmi slowed her pace and turned to face Maggie. “She angry with me, Maggie. One day she is saying I making fools of our family by making fake marriage. Next day she saying I is wanting to be first to marry, being oldest daughter. That's why I plan this paper marriage. Nothing I say to her—that I do it to save both our family's izzat and save Mister's face—mean anything to her.” Lakshmi's voice was as raw as crushed glass. “Bas. From that day only, I lose my sister. Who I loves from the minute she born.”

There it was again—the familiar combination of pity and obligation that she always felt toward Lakshmi. Maggie tried to recall the sense of betrayal she had felt a few minutes earlier, but it had vanished, dissipated, like hunger after a meal. “We can't be responsible for other people's reactions to us, Lakshmi,” she said. “We can only make sure that our intentions are good.” But her words felt hollow to her, empty lines out of a textbook, devoid of the daily bruisings suffered by the human heart.

Surely Lakshmi heard that rote quality in her voice, because she flung Maggie a curious look and resumed walking. Maggie's heart sank as she realized that she had failed a test, that she had not given her best to her client. It was one of the most salient rules of psychotherapy—to remain objective, to accept without judgment a client's revelations. And God, she had heard so much worse over the years, had sat nodding as clients revealed extramarital affairs, abortions that were kept secret from partners, tales of domestic abuse. None of those confessions had rattled her the way Lakshmi's story had.

This is different, Maggie argued with herself. Lakshmi is not just a client. She's a friend.

There it was. The inevitable result of blurring the lines. She had blithely flouted all the rules of her profession, and this was the consequence—her inability to provide Lakshmi with the basic support she needed.

Out of the blue, the trembling started. She had not suffered from an episode in so long that it took her a moment to recognize what was happening. She glanced sidelong at Lakshmi to see if she'd noticed, but the woman was staring at the ground as she walked. Maggie placed her hands in the pockets of her jeans to steady their shaking. She forced herself to take a few deep breaths. Focus, she said to herself. Focus. This is still Lakshmi's hour.

She swallowed a few times to wet her mouth and then she spoke. “So what you said to me before—that you hadn't written to Shilpa because your husband forbade it—is that not true?”

Lakshmi's forehead knitted in confusion. “Pardon? What is ‘forbade' mean?”

“Forbade . . . he told you not to. Stopped you from writing.”

“Ah, yes.” Lakshmi nodded vigorously to show her comprehension. “No, no, I not lying to you, Maggie. Husband so angry with my family. He say we cheaters. He tell me not to contact them again.”

The gust of anger that ran through Maggie was sudden and forceful. “And you just listened?” she asked, hearing the unintended harshness in her voice.

The younger woman shrugged. “What to do, Maggie? I eating my husband's salt, spending his moneys. Plus, I making this sin against him.”

“But you're not. Not now, I mean. You have your own income.” She was shaking hard, but it was impossible to say whether it was from anger or that other thing. In any case, they were not too far away from the house now.

Lakshmi's eyes narrowed. “Maggie. What wrong? Why your body doing this?”

“I don't know. I think I'm cold,” she lied.

“You sick. I come in and make you some hot-pot soup.”

“No.” The word came out louder, more emphatic than she'd intended. “No,” she said again, softly. “I told you. I have a client coming in after you.”

“But—”

“Lakshmi. I'm okay. Just let it go. I want to ask you, what's stopping you from writing to your father and sister now? After all these years?”

“I's ascare, Maggie. What if they not writing back? What if Shilpa still angry with me?”

Maggie was a little out of breath as they climbed up the steep incline that led to her house. “When you came to my house the very first time, were you scared?” she asked.