The Vine of Desire (38 page)

Nights are when I wonder most what Anju is doing. Where she is. When we were growing up, she used to sleep with one knee drawn toward her chest. She always wanted an extra pillow, which would end up on the floor.

I pad my quilt with old cotton saris, each washed a hundred times in rainwater. I stitch it by hand. No machine shortcuts for my quilt. I use a stem stitch, which doubles up carefully on itself so it will never unravel.

Now I must plan the design. Must make it at once fabulous and real. Breathtaking in its complexity. Astonishing in its simpleness. Will there be women in my quilt? Mangala’s silver anklets. Nicole’s golden hair. Sara’s (but why her?) iridescent nails. The lost ones, safe in a place where no one can harm them ever again.

Can I ask Lalit to go to the university? To wait outside her class, to speak to her as she leaves? No, no, that would be abusing his generosity.

I want my quilt to be like the quilts out of the tales that Pishi used to tell us. Sewn with resham thread in stitches so tiny and seamless that the images looked alive—and sometimes they were. Bulbuls flew out from these quilts on their red satin wings. Young lovers linked hands and disappeared down a shaded forest lane.

But there will be no lovers in my quilt.

The old man doesn’t talk to me, but sometimes he watches as I wheel in food, as I dust a little sandalwood powder over his concave
chest after his daily sponge bath. Against my fingers, the white hairs on his chest are surprisingly tough, like roots. If I ask him a direct question, Shall I cook rajma beans for dinner tonight, or Shall I turn on the TV for you, what would you like to watch, he freezes like a wild animal caught in headlights. I’ve learned to say, Maybe the curtains should be opened a little, it’s such a pretty day. I’ve learned to read his responses. Stiffening of the neck, eyes focused on an invisible object past my head:
no.
Eyes closed, a small, puffed-out breath:
I don’t care, do what you want.

Sometimes Dayita clatters in after me in her walker, which she loves. I’m understanding more of her baby chatter: her version of
juice
and
Froot Loops
and
blankie.
Sometimes she asks for Anju, sometimes for Sunil, whom she still calls Baba. She rolls up to the music system and wants me to turn it on,
Pay song.
Her favorite thing to do is to point to things and ask their names.
This? This? She
points to old man. This is Grandpa, I say, Dadu. Da-da, she says. She bumps against the bed. Da-da. The old man stares at her. Each time he looks astonished, as though he has never seen a child before.

Hush, I tell her. Don’t bother Grandpa.

Da-da-da.

The old man exhales, a small, truncated puff of air, and closes his eyes.

“I do believe he’s getting fond of us,” I tell Lalit.

I wait for him to make one of his usual comments,
Uh-huh, right
, or
Dream on
, or
Hope lives forever in the human breast.
But he only says, with a new cautiousness that saddens me, “That would be very nice.”

Maybe I will put a river in my quilt, down which a boat travels. The boat will be shaped like a peacock, like in the fairy tales. The sails will be the color of peacock feathers. On the boat will be a woman, reading a book. Can I bear to have her resemble Anju?

The old man eats, but not much. Only enough, I suspect, to keep from being hospitalized. Stuffed baby eggplants, chicken baked in yogurt-almond sauce, rice pudding studded with fat raisins—nothing tempts him. He’ll eat his few mouthfuls, then push the plate away. If I grumble, or try to persuade him, he covers his face with the sheet. Each morning, his profile is a little gaunter, a little more withdrawn. Each morning, the bones stick up pole-like under the tent of his bedclothes.

When Trideep and Myra come to see him, he doesn’t respond to Trideep’s questions. Myra’s desperate small talk. He doesn’t make requests anymore. He just closes his eyes.

“It was almost better when he used to yell and scream and throw things,” Myra says.

“You must be joking,” I reply. But I know what she means. I, too, am concerned as to where this might lead.

“Just when we thought he was getting better!” Trideep says, his face pinched with worry. “Why won’t he talk to us? Is he all right?”

He isn’t all right. But Trideep knows that. His father closes his eyes because he can’t stand to be here. In this bed, in this house, in this country, all of which is alien to him. He tolerates me because I’m the hired help, just doing my job. But he hates them because they’re his captors.

“He’s sad,” I say.

“How can we make him happy?” they ask. But I, struggling under my own sadness, don’t know the answer to that.

This Sunday, Lalit wants to take me up to Grizzly Peak, to see the sunset across the bay.

“Go, go,” Myra says. “I’ll keep Dayita. She’s good therapy for me. She keeps me from obsessing.”

Up in the park, the cold wind stings my face, but it’s clean and strong and salty. It clears my head a little. Thanks to Lalit, I’m beginning to recognize some of the trees around us—the bent black cypress, the peeled silver bark of the eucalyptus, the brittle crackly needles of ponderosa pine. Feathery yarrows, near our feet.

A small comfort, this.

“Look,” Lalit says. “There’s the campanile at Cal, there’s the Bay bridge, backed up as usual, there’s Angel Island, where at one time deer and immigrants were quarantined. That’s the ferry to Sausalito, where all the decadent artists live. Did you know that Marin County is the home of the hot tub? Did you know that Coit Tower was built by San Francisco firemen in the shape of firehose nozzle? That’s Alcatraz, from which no prisoners ever escaped alive.”

There’s such fondness in his voice. I’m racked by jealousy. To belong to a place fully, to know it so well that you believe it belongs to you. Does he even guess how lucky he is?

“Look that way,” he says. “There’s Mount Tam. See the Indian Maiden, sleeping? Once you get beyond the Golden Gate Bridge, you’re on the Pacific Ocean. In November the whales start migrating south. The blues, the orcas. You can go out on a
boat and watch them, spouting water up to fifty feet. It’s like nothing else in the world. In February they come back up with babies.”

“I’d like to see that,” I say, though February, or November, or even next week seems distant and unreal, a fog-wrapped shore I might never reach.

“I’ll take you and Dayita both,” he says. “I’ll take you to Point Lobos, to see the cormorants on Bird Island. And to Año Nuevo, that’s where elephant seals come in December to have their babies. Did you know there’s an island out there, a ruined lighthouse that’s been taken over by the sea lions?” Then he says, “You never did tell me what happened.”

I tried. Last Sunday, and the Sunday before, when he came to see me. But each time I’d feel dizzy, sick to my stomach. I didn’t have the right phrases to make him see beyond what happened into the why. I was afraid he, too, would despise me?

“Do you believe in falling stars?” I say.

“Another brilliant prevarication, I see.”

“I’m sorry, I just can’t talk about it.”

“Try. Don’t worry about shocking me. I come across a lot of terrible things at work. Some of them so bad you can’t even imagine …”

I fiddle with the zipper of my jacket.

“Oh, very well,” he says, “what about the stars?”

I tell him about our terrace in Calcutta, the old bricks edged with moss. How Anju and I would steal away at night to look for falling stars to wish on.

“And did any of the wishes come true?”

“None of Anju’s did. But she never really believed in it. She’d say things like, For my next birthday, I want my very own
pet elephant. Or, I want to become the most successful female spy in the world, more famous than Mata Hari.”

“What about you?”

“My wishes got all twisted around. I don’t think I really knew what I wanted. My brain was so filled with old stories, and what society defined as happiness. One time, just before Anju and I got married, I was so sad to think that we’d be separated, that I wished we could love the same man, like women did in the Mahabharata, that we could all live together….”

Stars are opening in the night’s blackness, like startled eyes. Against them, a bird wheels across the sky, elegant and purposeful. A red-tailed hawk, perhaps, returning to his nest in some crag. Wild things always know where their home is. In India, kingfishers are bringing food to fledglings in their morning nests. In my quilt I will stitch in hawks and kingfishers.

I’d forgotten that old, foolish wish all these years. Until now, until I spoke of it. And, in speaking, saw it newly, in all its insidiousness.

“Your wish came true, didn’t it?” Lalit says. The wind has died. The cypresses are icicles of dark. The clouds clap their hands over the moon’s mouth. I cannot feel his eyes. I cannot read his voice. And so I cannot tell him,
It’s not what you think. It’s not like that at all.

It’s dark when I unlock the door. In my mind I’m busy repeating the code of the burglar alarm, in case they turned it on, so I don’t see him until he moves. Trideep. He’s sitting on the white couch by himself, not doing anything.