The Vine of Desire (46 page)

Ashok sits erect. His sleeves are rolled up, his arm muscles as well defined as ever. He must still be lifting weights. His profile is lean and thoughtful. The clean, intelligent line of his nose is so familiar that an illogical regret catches in my throat. He doesn’t look any older than when I saw him last. This surprises me until I remember that I said good-bye to him just a few months ago. It’s only I who have been through a century’s worth of changes. There’s a notebook in his lap. I step closer and see that it’s an artist’s pad. He’s been sketching the lilies. I didn’t know he drew. His style is spare, the charcoal strokes few and masterful. This, too, surprises me.

“Sudha?” he says, without turning around.

“When did you learn to draw so well?”

“I started after you left for America. I’m very much an amateur, but it helps me to stay calm.” He keeps gazing at the lilies, which annoys me.

“I can’t imagine you not being calm—ever,” I say, an edge to my voice.

A small smile. “You think I’m calm right now?”

I step around to stand in front of him. “How can I tell when you won’t look at me?”

“I was afraid—like in the story of Eurydice—that you might disappear.” But he does look. And continues to look until I smooth down the thin cotton of the skirt with self-conscious fingers. Finally he says, “You’ve changed, Sudha. That was the other thing I was afraid of.”

“Changed how?” I say, my voice belligerent. “You mean because I’m wearing Western clothes?”

He shakes his head. “That wasn’t what I meant, though a sari does make you look more beautiful.”

I can’t help making a face. Is there anything as conservative as a conservative Indian male?

He holds up his hand. “I’m not saying it’s a negative change. You’re just different. I see it in the way you stand, the muscles of your shoulders, your neck. It’s like you’re threaded through with galvanized wire.”

“You see that?” I say, taken aback. No one else has mentioned anything like that to me. But, then, who has known me for as long as Ashok has? Only Anju—and she and I have been too closely tangled to see anything but our reflected selves in each other’s eyes.

He nods. “It makes me fear what you’ve been through—something that shook you up more than leaving your husband, even. No! I don’t want to know. I’m only sorry I wasn’t here to take care of you.”

Again that phrase. “It’s not your job to take care of me,” I say heatedly. “I’m an adult.”

“Even adults need to be cared for, by people who love them.”

Now is the perfect time to say,
I don’t love you.
But somehow I can’t. Our shared history, his patient waiting, this long and expensive journey he’s undertaken for me and my daughter—they stop my mouth. I cannot forget that I’m the first one he loved, too.

“Anyway, now that I’m here, you can tell the people you’re working for that you’re quitting. I’ve reserved our tickets for next week—I did that as soon as you phoned me. That should give your employers enough time to find a replacement.” He adds gallantly, “Not that anyone could ever replace you.”

“Whoa!” Inside me, anger is playing tug-of-war with disbelieving laughter. “I never said I’m going back with you.”

“But why not? What reason do you have to remain here, now that you’re not helping Anju anymore?”

I don’t know how to answer him. Maybe that’s why I let anger take over. “And I don’t like people making high-handed decisions without consulting me.”

He looks hurt. Taken aback. “I’m only trying to help, to speed things along. We’ve wasted so much time unnecessarily—time that we could have been together.”

Guilt stings me. “You shouldn’t have come, Ashok. I told you over and over to forget me. The love we felt for each other was beautiful—but it was a long time ago. We’re both different people now.”

“I’m not.”

“Well, I am. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. But you’re in love with an idealized me that doesn’t exist anymore—if it ever did.”

“That’s not true. I love the real you, the Sudha that’s pure and innocent and loving, no matter what—”

“The real me! You have no idea who I am, Ashok. I don’t think anyone does—except maybe Anju. Maybe that’s why she won’t have anything to do with me. Let me tell you. When I came to this country, I knew right away that Sunil was attracted to me. I should have left at once. Gone back. But I was greedy for something more than the life I could have had with the mothers in Calcutta. I told myself I was doing it for Anju and for my daughter, but really I was doing it for me. I was the one who wanted to be adored. I was the one who wanted to be admired. Half the time I thought of my poor daughter as an obstacle that kept me from what I longed for.”

There’s a pained look on Ashok’s face. But he says, “That’s only natural, Sudha. You never had any of those things, and so—”

“Don’t make excuses for me, Ashok. That’s what I convinced myself—that I deserved those things. If life wasn’t going to give them to me easily, I was going to snatch them, no matter what. I went to a party. I met a young man. If you think I’m good and innocent, you should see him. He’s the real thing. I knew he was attracted to me. I went out with him even though I knew it would make Sunil crazy with jealousy.”

“Enough, Sudha! You don’t have to say any more!”

A strange recklessness has taken me over. All those words I held back because I cared so much what Lalit might think. What freedom to finally let them go. What freedom not to care anymore. “Yes, I do! I have to say it, and you have to listen! You must!” I kneel in front of him, so that he’s forced to look at me. “Sunil made me have sex with him. No, it’s wrong to say it that way, putting the blame on him. Because I didn’t fight it. Maybe I was even hoping for it. Why else did I lie down on his bed? And when it happened, I enjoyed it….”

Ashok gazes at me—not with the shock I hoped for, but an unexpected sorrow. He leans toward me, as though to take my hand. The notepad falls to the ground, but he ignores it.

I snatch my hand back. I don’t want kindness. Or pity. I want to shock him so much that he’ll leave my life, never to return. Or is it my internal demons I’m trying to exorcise? “I left, but was it really because I felt guilty?” Out of the corner of my eye, I see a movement. It’s Lalit, back after half an hour, as he had promised.

How much did he hear?

Almost, I stop speaking. Then I go on. Let them listen. Let
them both listen. “No. It was because Sunil frightened me. There was such a need inside him, need like a black bottomless pit. Even if I poured my entire self into it, I couldn’t fill it. So I ran away.”

Ashok is silent. He doesn’t look at me.

I’m glad of that. It’s easier to leave when they don’t look at you.

I pick up the notepad and put it on the bench next to him. “I’m sorry if I hurt you, Ashok,” I say as I stand up. “I’m sorry if I made you hate me. But it’s best that you know the truth. Now you can forget me—the me you created, the me who wasn’t real—and start over. And maybe I can, too.”

“Wait.”

I turn.

“I’ll go back, like you want,” he says. “I won’t try to persuade you further. Not because I hate you—how can I? I have my own faults, too, my acts of weakness. Don’t worry, I’m not planning to burden you with them. I’ll go because I can see that you have, indeed, detached yourself from your past completely—I hadn’t quite believed someone could do that….”

If only he knew how incomplete my detachment is, how many bygones I still agonize over.

“And so I mean no more to you than a stranger you might meet at a street crossing.”

I let him go on. There’s pain in his voice, but I don’t dare comfort him. It would undo everything I’ve achieved with such difficulty.

“Other people have become more important to you now….”

Is he glancing toward Lalit, waiting in the shadow of the mimosas?

“I need to come to terms with all this—I don’t know how
long it’ll take. But that’s no longer your concern.” He pauses, perhaps to give me a chance to disagree. When I don’t speak, he hands me the notepad. “I want you to have this.”

I want to refuse, but I know I must take it. This last gift, by accepting which I accept our past together, my indebtedness. I put out my hand. In my mind, I say,
We did love each other. It’s gone now, but it was good and true. I thank you for it.

In the car, I open the pad. Page after page of sketches. Except for the lilies on the last page, they’re all pictures of me. How well he’s caught my expressions. How well he’s remembered moods I don’t even recall having felt. Here’s me as a schoolgirl, looking obedient and dutiful in the sacklike uniform the nuns made us wear. Me in a salwaar kameez at the movies, a shy half-smile on my face. Me reading a book, braiding my hair, looking into a mirror with a faraway expression. Me in a sari, with a temple in the background, looking excited and scared. That must have been the last time he saw me before my wedding. Me as a wife, with a bindi on my forehead, the end of a sari covering my hair. He must have imagined that one. Me looking very pregnant, a rebellious set to my lips—that was after I left Ramesh. There are more—me in a boat on a mountain lake, laughing, the wind lifting my hair; me waking up in bed, looking sleepily surprised; me playing with a baby who isn’t Dayita. With a pang I realize that I’m looking into the heart of Ashok’s hopes.

The wind roars in my ears. Lalit is driving far too fast.

“Whoa,” I say. “When did you get your pilot’s license?”

He doesn’t come back with a joke, the way I’d hoped. Instead, he says, staring straight ahead, “All those things you said about yourself, you were only saying them to force Ashok to stop loving you. Right?”

My throat hurts as though I’m coming down with the flu. “Is that what you think?” I say.

We ride the rest of the way in silence.

Uncle says, “Every monsoon, the Tista used to flood. My friends and I would play hooky from school and go to see it. The water would be swollen, with brown foam from all the washed-away earth. You could hear the roar of the river from half a mile away. The best part was the whirlpools.” His finger makes circle shapes on Dayita’s palm, tickling her, and she laughs. “We’d throw sticks in it, watch them disappear.”

They’re sitting on his bed, my daughter and the old man whom I’ve started calling Uncle. It’s been two weeks now since we made our secret plan. Already he looks stronger. He can walk to the bathroom, holding on to me, dragging his left foot. He can sit up in bed and eat by himself. He’s set himself a strict regimen: breakfast is followed by a few stretches in bed; then a brief rest; then I help him into his wheelchair and take him to the living room window so he can look out on the view. After lunch, which he takes at the table with Dayita and me, he sleeps. A few easy exercises when he wakes. Then tea. After that I read to him, or we listen to music. He’s surprised me with a fondness for jazz. In the evening he plays with Dayita or tells us stories. Yesterday he asked me to look in his suitcase. Inside was a wooden box that opened into a chessboard. The carved figures were dressed in British uniforms and in Mughal garb. The queens had tiny tiaras that winked with real jewels. I’ll teach you next week, he said. My job is mainly to see that he doesn’t overdo things and to be a listener. For after his long silence, he can’t get enough of talking about the place he loves more than any other place on earth.

By the time Myra and Trideep return from work, he’s back in bed, quilt drawn up to his chin, eyes closed. He’ll whisper an anemic hello and pretend he’s too tired to respond when they try to talk to him. He’ll only eat his dinner after they’ve given up and gone away. “Let me have my little secret,” he told me with an urchin’s grin when I protested. “The day when I can walk by myself to the living room, I’ll tell them!”

My own life is bleaker. No reply from Anju to the note I sent her last week. When he calls, Lalit seems distant and preoccupied. Abrupt. I guess that Ashok has returned to India, but there’s no one I can ask. My sleep is knotted with complicated dreams I can’t remember when I wake. They leave a faint bitterness in my mouth, as when one has had a fever. I have thrown out Sunil’s tape, but sometimes I think I hear his voice,
Sudha, Sudhaaa, how can you abandon me? The
phone number he spoke is imbedded in my brain, refusing to be forgotten. My disobedient fingers yearn to dial it.

Torn strips of a story that Pishi told us years ago come back to me. Once there was a man who was addicted to thievery. One day he met a saint who convinced him to repent—yet the man found that he could not stop stealing, even though he no longer wished to. I forget the middle of the story, but it ends with the man chopping off his right hand, to save himself from himself.

To save myself, I pour my attention into preparing Uncle’s meals. I nag Myra until she goes to the Chinese market for fresh catfish. I sauté it with black jeera and turmeric and make jhol, the traditional clear soup one drinks after a long illness to build strength. I curdle milk and make fresh paneer sprinkled with sugar. I soak almonds overnight in warm water until they are soft and give them to him for breakfast.