The Vine of Desire: A Novel Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI’S

  The Vine of Desire

  “Divakaruni is a brilliant storyteller, illuminating the depths of need and the glitter of hope in the push-pull of growth and self-restraint…. Grab The Vine of Desire. Divakaruni is a transplanted cultural treasure.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “As gracefully structured as a piece of chamber music, with its interplay of themes and voices, ensemble and solo, working their way toward a final resolving chord…. If you find yourself counting the pages left in the book, it’s likely to be because you wish there were many, many more.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “Among contemporary writers from India, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni fills a space all her own…. Her fiction draws a line straight to the heart…. With The Vine of Desire, she proves once again that she’s an expressive interpreter of the immigrant experience.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Reading Divakaruni is a pleasure. She paints worlds of complex characters and cultures with an absorbing story line and beautiful language that reads like poetry.”

  —The Oregonian

  “Compassionate…. Persuasive…. Provid[es] with graceful economy a complex backdrop of contemporary Indian society.”

  —The Boston Sunday Globe

  “Dazzling and powerful…. Warm-hearted…. Divakaruni’s descriptions, as always, possess a fine lyrical beauty…. Readers … will have much to feast on.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Moving, passionate…. Engrossing…. A beautiful, imperfect journey, much like life itself, and one well worth taking.”

  —Austin American-Statesman

  “[An] exquisitely rendered tale of passion, jealousy, and redemption…. Divakaruni combines a gift for absorbing narrative with the artistry of a painter. Her lyrical descriptions of the characters’ inner and outer worlds bring a rich emotional chiaroscuro to an uplifting story.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Vivid and lyrical language…. Divakaruni has always written well about the immigrant experience…. [She] draws a compelling contrast between the selflessness required of women in India and the sometimes bewildering freedoms offered in their adopted land.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

  “A potent, emotional book delivered by a writer who knows when to step back and take in the poetry.”

  —Book

  “Compelling…. Divakaruni writes prose that is lush. … [She] excels at depicting the nuances of the immigrant experience.”

  —SF Weekly

  Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  The Vine of Desire

  Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is the bestselling author of the novels Sister of My Heart and The Mistress of Spices; the story collections The Unknown Errors of Our Lives and Arranged Marriage, which received several awards, including the American Book Award; and four collections of prize-winning poetry. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Ms., Zoetrope, Good Housekeeping, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Best American Short Stories 1999, and The New York Times. Born in India, Divakaruni lives near Houston.

  For further information about Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, visit her Web site at www.chitradivakaruni.com.

  ALSO BY CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI

  The Unknown Errors of Our Lives

  Sister of My Heart

  Arranged Marriage

  Leaving Yuba City

  The Mistress of Spices

  Black Candle

  once more for you:

  my three men

  Anand

  Abhay

  Murthy

  Again the day, again the night

  Dawn and dusk, winter, spring.

  In the play of time, life ebbs away—

  Only desire remains

  Again birth, again death

  Again the dark journey through the womb

  In this world of changes, nothing holds fast

  Except the coiled vine of desire

  Bhaja Govindam, Sri Shankaracharya (A.D. 788–820)

  And what did you want?

  To call myself beloved, to feel myself

  beloved on the earth.

  “Late Fragment,” Raymond Carver

  Book One

  Subterranean

  Truths

  Eros is strength abandoning itself to something elusive, something that stings.

  —The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Robert Calasso

  Prologue

  In the beginning was pain.

  Or perhaps it was the end that was suffused with pain, its distinctive indigo tint. Color of old bruises, color of broken pottery, of crumpled maps in evening light. But, no, not like them, ultimately. For although men have tried for thousands of years to find the right simile—and women, too—ultimately pain is only like itself.

  This, too: it is hard to tell which is the beginning, and which the end. Particularly when it is one’s own story, when its segments loop around, repeating themselves randomly, like a piece of computer code gone wrong.

  The woman did not think any of this, lying strapped inside the ambulance as it jolted its keening way to the hospital. She was focusing on the boy, the way he clung to the wet-silk walls of her womb. They rippled like the muscles of an angry snake, trying to shake him off. He curled himself inward, tight as a peach pit, hoping for invisibility. She hoped for him, too. But there is no fooling the flesh that formed you. The nurses were rushing them down white neon corridors to the double doors marked Emergency. They stretched her across the operating table. Hieroglyphs of blood on the paper-white sheets; she didn’t know how to read them. The overhead lights were eyes, gigantic, insectile. Her womb heaved. The placid waters that had rocked the boy all these months had become a whirlpool. They spun him down toward the narrow passage that he knew to be death—yes, even the unborn know what death is. For a moment she felt his terror, became it. The crimson and black pulsing in his eyes. The taste in his mouth, sour, amniotic. Later she would think of it as the taste of failure. Hers. She heard someone scream. A metallic, spine-raking sound. Why, it was her! Inside her, she felt him scream back. Her echo, her shadow, her hope for eternity. Her golden child, in whom she had thought to bury all the errors of her past.

  An immense force was tearing him from her now, past the lumped and bloody flesh in the doctor’s hand, outward, upward. She followed, shaking off the ungainly body that he had shared, briefly, with her. They shot into space with such speed that it seemed she would explode. He was crying. Keep me with you. She was crying, too. Don’t you think I want to? More than anything else in the world? Don’t you know I’d give up everything in my life, right now, if I could, for that? But except the night clouds skimming across the moon’s tattooed face, no one heard them. Except the small brown owls, birds of witness and reclamation. The clouds did not falter. Huddled into tree knots, the owls did not lift their heads to watch the bright specks hurtling upward, dual shooting stars, reversed. They had heard such wailing many times, seen many such lights disappear. Except for those to whom it is happening, death is hardly a unique occurrence.

  Shimmering and gaseous, he spun into space, and she in his wake, so light that she wondered if perhaps she no longer existed. He was looking over her shoulder, a gaze of such sorrow that she, too, turned to look. She saw the scalloped walls of the old Victorians on the hills of the city, and knew its name. San Francisco, she whispered, the syllables at once familiar and amazing in her mouth, and the lights in the tall triangular tower downtown flickered acknowledgment. Mist drifted, fragile as promises, over the cypresses that lined the ocean cliffs. Southward the bay glea
med like a woman’s curved arm. Studded with ruby taillights, the bridges were her bracelets. Up at Point Reyes, pewter waves etched the empty shore. A cormorant rose with a black cry, a lumbering flap of its wings. Out to the west, moonlight, leaping off the backs of porpoises, flashed an enigmatic code.

  It filled her with rage. That he should be given a glimpse of such beauty only to have it snatched away!

  But now her eyes were caught by the cities of the south bay. San Jose, Sunnyvale, Milpitas, their smoky, stubborn sprawl. In the low apartment houses by the freeways, pinpricks of yellow lights were going out one by one as people readied themselves for bed. One of those windows had belonged to her. To her and a man—but who was he? She couldn’t quite recall. Only that he’d been significant. She felt a pull as she sensed this, downward, into the tangled, unfinished life she’d left with him. Her imperfect life, her caught-in-the-body life, with its ferocious, zigzag pulse.

  And with that thought she finds herself falling. Fast, faster. She tries to stop herself, to reach into the vast hushed swirling of light that hangs above her head. Where has her son gone? Where? No use. She plummets through space, solid as a spent bullet, rapid as rage. Galaxies blur past her. Black holes. She sinks into emptiness, that hollow metal cube in the center of her being. Clouds now, the calm, unwrinkled peaks of mountains, the lacy glimmer where ocean licks at earth. The brown glow of the city, its brave smells—gasoline and tired sweat—settling around her like arms. She wants to push them away. All of them.

  I will take no pleasure in any of this. Never again.

  The lights of the hospital are stark and unseeing like the whites of rolled-up eyes. They singe her as she falls through the different stories, the different wards. Surgery, Radiology, Crisis Intervention. How many ways there are to die! She is breathless by the time she reaches the room where a woman lies splayed on an operating table. A frenzy of activity around her, men and women in masks swarming like white bees. Staccato orders being barked out. A limp brown hand, a thin wrist with the pale plastic tag that offers up to strangers the woman’s secrets. Majumdar, Anju, 635-81-9900. Why, it’s her, again! There are tubes. Needles. Dark and pale liquids pumped by blinking machines. The stench of spilled membranes, hopes tattered as newspapers abandoned in alleyways. The machines whir so loudly, she cannot hear what the white-coats are saying. When she looks closer, the pores on the skin of the woman’s face are enormous, black as burned-out craters. They widen like intractable mouths. She winces upward, but there is only a bumpy, spackled ceiling above her head, impenetrable. She feels herself turn thin and liquid, feels herself being sucked in.

  She wakes in another room, inside the claustrophobic clutch of her flesh. A faint smell hangs around her, like rotten eggs. Pain slams into her once more, flattening her against the bed. Dazed and breathless, she is already forgetting where she has been, what she has been capable of. But the sense of emptiness. She can’t forget that. When she can move again, she pulls the hospital pillow over her head with a choking sound.

  There’s a ringing in her ears, someone chanting a toneless word. It takes her a moment to understand it. Prem Prem Prem. The name that was to have been the boy’s.

  The man—yes, there’s a man at her bedside, suddenly, with imploring fingers, him—tugs at the pillow, but the woman is surprisingly strong. The tendons inside her elbows stand out like wires as she thrashes from side to side. The man is forced to call for a nurse. Two women come. One holds her down while the other shoots a chemical into her vein. They tell the man to go home. Get some rest. There’s nothing you can do for her right now, one adds. Her voice is detached but not unkind. Before she leaves, she turns down the light so the room is dim and green, the color of seawater.

  Alone in the sea-green light, the woman feels her muscles begin to loosen in spite of herself. She is coming apart, the way a braid does when one has been swimming a long time. Soon her eyes will flicker with furious dreams under her closed lids. Her unruly eyebrows will angle into questions to which there are only uncertain answers. Why? Why? Where? With the last of her strength, she pushes her body to the edge of the mattress, cups it into a shape against which a child might rest. There, that’s good. With the last of her strength, she holds on to something she heard a long time ago, in another country, when she was not much more than a child herself: the dead are not irrevocably dead as long as one refuses to let them go.

  One

  The day Sudha stepped off the plane from India into Anju’s arms, leaving a ruined marriage behind, their lives changed forever. And not just Sudha’s and Anju’s. Sunil’s life changed, too. And baby Dayita’s. Like invisible sound waves that ripple out and out, the changes reached all the way to India, to Ashok waiting on his balcony for the wind to turn. To their mothers in the neat squareness of their flat, upsetting the balance of their household, causing the mango pickles to turn too sour and the guava tree in the backyard to grow extra-large pink guavas. The changes multiplied the way vines might in a magical tale, their tendrils reaching for people whose names Sudha and Anju did not even know yet.

  Were the changes good or bad?

  Can we use such simple, childish terms in asking this question? Neither of the cousins were simple women, though there was much that was childlike about them when they were together alone, or with Dayita. When Sunil was away.

  Sunil. Anju’s husband. Sudha’s cousin-in-law. A young executive with a bright future in a prestigious computer company. But no. None of this tells us who he really is. Because he wasn’t a simple man either.

  It is not clear when Anju first sensed this. At their double wedding, when she stood beside Sunil, their bridal garments knotted, and watched him watch Sudha’s forehead being marked with the red powder of wifehood? Months back, when he told Anju that it was a bad idea to bring her cousin to America? The night before Sudha’s arrival, by which time it was too late? When did she first sense that though she loved him, she didn’t always trust him?

  But lately Anju doesn’t trust the runaway roller coaster of her own emotions either. The wild mood swings after the miscarriage that would leave her weeping or laughing hysterically. The long bouts of depression, later, that immobilized her in bed, incapable of even answering the phone.

  Guilt ate at her, a slow, pernicious rust. No matter how often Sunil assured her that the miscarriage could have been caused by any number of things, she didn’t believe him. When the blackness came upon her, her mind turned heavy and stubborn, like one of those cement mixing trucks you pass sometimes on the road. A sentence would catch in it and begin to rotate, If only I’d listened to the doctor and not overworked myself, until it broke down into a phrase, If only I hadn’t, If only I hadn’t. It ended, always, in the same anguished chant. Prem Prem Prem.

  She would rock her body from side to side, her neglected will-o’-the-wisp hair spreading its static on the sofa, fingers digging rigidly into her arms until they left bruises shaped like tiny petals.

  “I don’t know how to help you when you’re like this,” Sunil would say.

  Afterward, when the depression lifted, she would sometimes say, “You don’t need to do anything.”

  Inside her head she added, Except love me.

  Inside her head he replied, I do love you.

  Inside her head she said, But not enough.

  The night before Sudha arrives, Anju cannot sit still. Some of it is excitement, but mostly she is nervous. Why? Isn’t this her dear, dear cousin, sister of her heart? They’ve protected, advised, cajoled, bullied, and stood up for each other all their lives. Each has been madly jealous of the other at some point. Each has enraged the other, or made her weep. Each has been willing to give up her happiness for her cousin. In short: they’ve loved each other the way they’ve never loved anyone else. Why then does Sudha’s coming fill Anju with this unexpected dread?

  If there are answers, she will not allow herself to think of them.

  At dinner she is unable to eat. “But what if Sudha doesn’t like it
here?” she keeps saying.

  It is the year of dangerous movements. Two weeks back, a major earthquake hit Los Angeles, causing seven billion dollars’ damage and leaving more than ten thousand people homeless. Will Anju and Sunil read this as an omen? Or will they discount it in the belief that every year has its own disasters?

  Anju, who is a terrible cook, has spent the day making lasagna because, she says, Sudha has never tasted any in India. The sink and their few dish towels are all dyed the same stunning orange, a color which looks fearfully permanent.

  Sunil doesn’t comment on this. He focuses instead on the gluey orange mass on his plate, at which he jabs half-heartedly from time to time. He is a meticulous man, a man who detests chaos. Who takes satisfaction each evening in shining his shoes with a clean rag and a tin of Esquire Boot Polish before putting them away on the closet shelf. But he makes an effort today and says nothing—both about the lasagna and about Anju’s question, which is not so much a question as a lament for something she fears has happened already. He is thinking of what she said a few weeks back, unthinkingly. The happiest memories of my life are of growing up with Sudha. He is thinking of what he didn’t say to her.

  What about me, then? What about you and me?

  “Let me tell you,” Anju was fond of saying in the last months of her pregnancy, “who I used to be before the accident of American happened to me.”

  She would be lounging in bed with a cup of hot milk and honey and a novel, one of those rare days when she didn’t have to go to class. She would knock on the curve of her stomach. “You, sir,” she would say. “I hope you’re paying attention.”