The Vine of Desire (15 page)

Eight

A
ssignment

Write an essay examining the effects of culture and heredity upon an individual. Would you say they are more important than character traits in influencing the individual’s behavior? You may support your analysis with personal as well as historical/social examples (approximately fifteen hundred words).

Loss: An Essay
by
Anju Majumdar
for
English 3353
Advanced Composition
Prof. P. Gossen

At the age of twenty-five, when she had barely stepped into her adult life, my mother became a widow. No. I’m thinking like me, not like
her. She had been an adult since she turned sixteen, the year her parents married her to my father—or, more accurately, to the illustrious Chatterjee family of Calcutta.

You can weep all you want on the train to Calcutta, her mother had said as she blessed the new bride. But by the time you arrive in your new home, your eyes should be dry. My mother obeyed, as she had been taught. She wept away her girlhood on that train. By the time she arrived at her in-law’s immense marble mansion in Calcutta, her eyes were dry and she was an adult. Perhaps that is why when news of my father’s death came to her—she was pregnant with me at the time—she did not shed a single tear. At least not in public.

Public is all I know of my mother’s life, because she never spoke of her feelings. Was this, too, what she had been taught?

Confession: this entire paper is based on hearsay and conjecture.

My father’s death was the greatest loss in my mother’s life. I think we can all agree on that. It turned her from a wife into a widow. In a society where property and destiny were controlled by men, it was not a good way to be.

These are the things my mother put away after my father’s death:
expensive saris, jewelry, romantic thoughts. The rest of her life, she would not eat Ilish fish or read poetry, both of which my father had loved. For a Bengali woman, those were serious sacrifices.

These are the things my mother made herself forget: that she was afraid; that she was a sexual being; that she needed to weep.

This is what she made herself remember: she had made a promise to my father, and she would keep it.

Pishi, my aunt, tells us that in the weeks following my father’s death, thirty-eight male relatives came to the house and offered to take on the burden of caring for my father’s widow (my mother), his unborn child (me), and his property (which would turn out to be considerably less than the thirty-eight male relatives had imagined). To all of them, my mother said no—very politely, as she had been taught. She said she would take care of all three herself. She ended up taking care of a lot more than that—Pishi and Aunt Nalini and Sudha and sick employees at the family bookstore and later, for a while, Dayita. But it was not a problem.

It was not a problem because, in order to deal with her loss, my mother had turned herself into a man.

She was a very effective man, more so than my father, who, for all
his goodness, was a dreamer and generous to a fault. Also, he had a tendency to trust all the wrong people. (This is why our property was considerably less.) He liked to sit in his easy-chair in the evenings and watch the stars, pointing out constellations enthusiastically but inaccurately. Sometimes he put on old Pankaj Mallik records and sang along. My mother, on the other hand, never sat in an easy chair, never listened to music, particularly the sentimental kind, and never trusted anyone except Pishi. As for stars, they were in the sky, and she was on the earth, and that was that. She also worked eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, to make sure we could keep living in the marble mansion, which by now was seriously attempting to fall to pieces, in a manner that befitted the descendants of the Chatterjees. This was the promise she had made to my father.

Because of the promise, my mother always knew what to do, even though (as with my marriage) it might turn out later to be the wrong thing.

My mother never made me promise her anything.

Growing up, I loved my mother more than anyone I knew. I admired her completely. When she embraced me, or gave me a rare word of praise, I thought, Paradise must be like this.

I learned everything I could from my mother.

But somewhere along the way, I went wrong.

How do I know this?

Because of the way I mishandle loss. The loss of my son, which has already occurred. And the loss of my husband, which has begun to occur, and which I cannot stanch.

Ms. Majumdar
,

Interesting subject matter, though it responds to the assignment in a rather tangential way. Can you give more specific examples in the beginning to help us visualize your mother’s life and times?

Your prose style is strong, but the paragraph structure is somewhat unorthodox. Watch out for diction, e.g., “Public is all I know of my mother’s life….”I notice a number of fragments in the draft. I am not convinced they are necessary. You mention a number of characters without explaining who they are. This is confusing. Try to move your draft from writer-based prose to reader-based prose.

The end of the paper loses focus and becomes overly emotional. You should keep yourself out of it. Consider rewriting from “My mother never made me promise her anything.” The part about paradise is a bit of a cliché.

Overall, this is a good start for an essay—but it needs to be developed in great detail. As I’m sure you remember, the assignment calls for a minimum of six pages. Please revise accordingly and turn it in by May 15.

P. Gossen

P.S. I am disturbed by the events you refer to at the end of the paper. I suggest you pay a visit to Counseling (312 Herne Hall).

Nine

S
udha

The bus comes and goes, its finger of smoke rubbing a darker gray into the evening. No Anju. Where is that girl? But nowadays she is often erratic, so I won’t worry yet. Not about her.

Chilly now. The light withdraws itself. A fog descends. It surrounds me, insistent, until I must breathe it in. Tiny drops of water coat the insides of my lungs. It is like drowning, a little at a time.

In the apartment parking lot, I look for Sunil’s car. If I see it, I won’t go upstairs, no matter how cold it gets. I’ll wrap my windbreaker around Dayita, and …

But, thankfully, the car is not there.

Sometimes I feel I’m being melodramatic. It’s not as though he’ll attack me. He’s not that sort of man. But if our eyes met in an empty room, if we drew the same air, simultaneously, into our lungs, I don’t know what might happen then.

Each day, weakness sings louder in me. In each fingertip, along the underside of my breasts that ache a little, through the veins lining my arms. The day after I signed my divorce papers,
Ashok kissed the vein at my wrist. Each kiss was sharp, defined, like an infusion of blood. Before that, my life had felt so unnecessary. We were sitting by the Ganges at Outram Ghat. The water was brown with silt and patience. He whispered something against my skin. I didn’t hear the words. But the sound was like a remedy spoken by a medicine woman into the ears of a person whose spirit has gone roaming. I put my other hand in the water. The current pressed against my fingers, heavy with age. It reminded me that things go on.

I turned and kissed Ashok on the lips, shocking him.

Why am I thinking of this, after I tore up his letter? Why am I thinking of Sunil? What is it I want?

The apartment is so dark. Turn on the lights—one, two, three. Still, brownness hazes the bulbs. Has the fog insinuated itself into this space as well?

Seeing Ashok’s letter today, my body drew itself in, tortoise-like. Tightness of shell and stone. Stiffened muscle. I should have been happy, but my body said otherwise. The body, which shows us our real desire.

I can’t go back to India, to the way I was. Helpless, dependent—I can’t love like that. I can’t bring up my daughter to think that is how a woman needs to live.

I think there are ways of being otherwise in India, but I don’t know them.

I can’t stay in my cousin’s home. My presence saws at the frayed rope that holds Anju and Sunil together. Maybe it would break anyway—but I can’t bear to be the reason. And my dreams. Fever-crusted, bloated with—there is no way to circumvent this word—sin. The angled curve of Sunil’s collarbone, a small sweat that stays on my fingertips. The dizzy salt taste of his chest, its rapid rise and fall against my tongue. I want
to slough off the images stamped inside my eyelids every morning, the moistness between my legs when I wake.

Caught inside the walls of this apartment, I have no way to silence my body’s clamoring.

A key rattles the lock. I am tense to my toes.

Sudha, where will you go now?

“Stop! Stop!” Anju says just as I’m pouring her tea. “No sugar!”

I look at her questioningly. Usually she takes a heaped spoonful. On days when she’s feeling low, she indulges in a spoon and a half.

“Do you know how bad sugar is for you?” she says. “All those disease-causing empty calories that make you hyper.”

I make a face. “Whence comes this sudden wisdom?” But I know. Every day she picks up snippets of self-improvement from college, some fad or other.

“I’m serious. I think you, too, should stop.”

She’s sitting earnest and cross-legged in jeans on the sofa, backpack thrown to the floor, the cup of tea clasped in her hands. Her face glows with zeal.

“Not me,” I say in some annoyance. “I like my vices, thank you.”

“Really, Sudha! It’s only a habit. We form habits, we can change them into more positive ones.” Then she breaks into a grin. “I know, I know, I sound like a bad copy of a Stephen Covey tape!”

I don’t know who this Covey is, but I don’t feel like telling her that.

She’s talking about her day at school. Zora Neale Hurston, she says. Kate Chopin. More names that mean nothing to me.
She waves her arm, gathering a wideness of air to herself. On the arm, glass bangles, color of blue ice. I must have helped pack them into her wedding suitcase, but I cannot remember it. The bangles make a tinkling, water music. When did she start wearing them again?

“So that horrid Professor Gossen, who always corrects my grammar and never sees that I’m trying to do something different, is away today—some conference where she’s presenting a paper, probably on comma splice—and this visiting professor is there instead. She’s reading aloud from the assignments she liked because she says we learn a lot from hearing the work of other student writers. And then she starts reading my essay! I could have died! You remember that essay about my mother I was having so much trouble with, the one Gossen thought was too ambiguous and went off-topic? Her comments depressed me so much that I didn’t even revise it, just turned it in, expecting a C. And this new woman thinks it’s one of the best in the class! She writes on the paper that I have Originality and Voice!”

“Voice,” I say, nodding as though I hear the word every day. I’m glad Anju is so happy about it, whatever it means.