The Vine of Desire: A Novel Read online

  “They meet every Tuesday,” Anju says, “for a couple of hours after class, and each one reads a piece and gets a response from the others—”

  I want to interrupt. Does she like her unsweetened tea? Is she too tired to go for a walk? Did she answer her mother’s letter? These are things I understand. I’ve made ghugni with chickpeas and flaked coconut, does she want some? When she talks of writing, I see once again Ramesh’s signature on the divorce papers. The letters had been sharp and feral. The blue ink held a glitter in it, like something secreted by a venomous insect. I’d never seen his signature before that because he’d never written to me.

  What will become of me on Tuesdays?

  “You won’t mind, will you, Sudha, dear?” Anju says. She’s pleading, which is rare for her. “It’ll be a long day alone for you—but this is so exciting! Nothing like this has happened to me, ever. I really liked this woman—she’s so passionate about things. So sure. So different from anyone I know.”

  Different from me, she means. A wave of jealous hurt scalds my insides.

  “She’s from Iran,” Anju says, not noticing. Does she notice anything about me nowadays? “Her family fled the country during Khomeini’s rule. She’s writing an essay about that time, particularly what happened to the women. I can’t imagine being able to write something like that! She said I had real talent and owed it to myself to develop it.”

  Owed it to myself. It was not an idea we’d grown up with in Calcutta. Owed it to my parents, yes. My ancestors. My in-laws. My children. Teachers, society, God. But owed it to myself? Yet how easily Anju says it today.

  What is it that I owe myself?

  “Do you think that’s true, Sudha?” Anju leans forward and grips my wrists. “Do you think I could really be a writer?”

  Her fingers are strong, still warm from the teacup. When we were girls, she’d grab me just like this, and I’d feel her excitement speeding up my heartbeat. Even when we became wives, she in San Jose and I bricked up in Bardhaman, we’d sense each other’s needs without having to talk. If one of us had a secret, the other would taste it, grainy and bitter like pomegranate seeds bitten into by accident.

  Today, nothing but heaviness.

  I’ve done that which I shouldn’t have, I tell her in my mind, willing her to hear. I’ve kissed your husband and liked it.

  “What do you think, Sudha? Shall I join the group?”

  Don’t leave me alone with him.

  “Sudha! Are you listening!”

  “How can I tell you what to do?” I say. Disappointment sharpens my tone. “I’ve never been to college.”

  “Don’t be like that!” Anju says. “You’re the one closest to me, the one who understands me best. The one I trust most of all.”

  There’s a muted hissing in my ears. I pretend to pick something up from the carpet so I can remove my hands from hers.

  “Try it, then,” I say. “You never know what’s right for you unless you try.” As soon as I’ve said them, the words feel ominous, loaded with a meaning I didn’t intend. A meaning that applies to my life as well.

  Anju leans forward and gives me a hug. “Thanks for encouraging me.”

  Oh, Anju! But even my grief is separate and muted. She will not guess it.

  “Need any help with dinner?” she asks. “Oh, I forgot, are there any letters?”

  I hand her the cream envelope.

  “Sunil Majumdar and Family!” she says. “How delightfully chauvinistic!” She flips the envelope over, looks at the name embossed on the back. Shrugs. “Don’t know them.” She leaves it on the coffee table for Sunil to open.

  Only now, in its loss, I know the value of what the two of us had. A metallic fog has wound itself around me. Is this how other people go through their lives? Hearing dimly, feeling even less? They hold out their arms, hoping to connect, but the metal glints, brutal as a mirror. All they can see is their own face. They—we—open our mouth to call out, and fog fills it like cotton candy. Loneliness candy, which melts into nothing, leaving a taste so sweet you cannot distinguish it from bitterness.

  “Did you hear the news?” Sunil says as he hurries into the apartment. “Nicole Brown, O. J. Simpson’s wife, has been murdered!”

  Another person for me to add to my list of not-knowns. But Anju asks, “You mean O. J. the athlete?”

  “Yes, him,” he shouts over his shoulder from the bedroom. Why is he so agitated? He carries the TV out and sets it up on the counter so that we can watch while we eat dinner.

  A young newscaster in a blue suit and pale brown hair looks out at us. His face is blankly handsome. “The body of Nicole Brown has been discovered in her house on Bundy Drive in Brentwood, along with that of an unidentified male companion,” he recites. “The police are trying to locate her ex-husband, football hero and actor O. J. Simpson, for questioning.”

  I ladle dal and brinjal curry onto our plates and bring out the fried fish, which I’ve kept crisp in the oven.

  “Crunchy fish, yum!” Anju says. “Oh, Sudha, you’re spoiling me!”

  Sunil gives her a reprimanding look, then goes back to staring at the TV. His cheeks are the dusty red of burnt bricks. He hasn’t touched his food, though he, too, is fond of fried fish. Pictures of a vaguely European-looking house, cordoned off with yellow police tape, flash on the screen. Then the photo of a blonde woman, beautiful in a chilly, film-star way. The camera zooms in on the dark stains on the steps. Thankfully, the bodies have been removed. “Arnelle Simpson, O. J.’s daughter, told the police that her father took a flight to Chicago some time late last night,” intones the newscaster gloomily. “Brian Kaelin, a friend of O. J.’s staying at his estate on Rockingham Drive, claims …” The picture goes fuzzy—it’s an old TV—and his words are drowned in static. Sunil jumps up to adjust the antenna, but by then the young man is describing the outbreak of yet another fire in the Oakland hills.

  “Damn!”

  I’m taken aback by the hard, pelleted word, the way his lips, tight as new elastic, choke it off. A murder is a terrible thing, true, but murders happen every day. Why is this one so important to him?

  We eat silently. The TV gives us a reason not to talk. There’s something unreal and orchestrated about news reports. Something I can’t quite believe. Why is it that so many people find events which are occurring to people they don’t know, in cities they’ll never set foot in, more compelling than their own problems? Even Anju. Growing up, she’d fiddle for hours with the knobs of the transistor radio she’d begged Gouri Ma to get her. She’d sit on the window seat of our bedroom, entranced by the faint, crackly sounds of All India Radio, or Akashbani Kalikata. Late at night, the BBC. All those lives so far from ours, so different. Beyond understanding, beyond helping. What was the point of filling our heads with their troubles?

  You can’t ever really know people that way, I once said to Anju.

  What fascinated me were the stories I’d hear the aunties whispering during their tea sessions. Forbidden stories about people who lived on our street. Stories of secrets that I, looking at their faces, would never have guessed at. People like Mangala, the Rai Bahadur’s maidservant. Though by the time I came to know her story, she, too, was beyond our helping.

  That’s whose face flashed through my mind as I watched the dead Nicole’s face on the screen. Mangala.

  I should be more like Anju, I know that. I need to learn about this country. The TV, in spite of all its faults, can offer me images. Names. The clues of accents. But I get confused. There’s a plane crash, all 262 passengers killed, for one minute on the screen. Then the story of a woman who had quintuplets, or a dog who saved a child. Also one minute. Is everything equally important in America? Or nothing important enough? I suspect codes embedded in the folds of the stories, in the curve of the anchorwoman’s eyebrow. Sara would have known how to decipher them.

  But why am I thinking of her in a wishful past tense, as though I won’t see her again?

  We eat. Nicole’s murder f
lashes on the screen intermittently, between discussions of a rise in the stock market and chances of rain. Sunil has recovered enough to compliment me on the brinjal curry. His second sentence. Each evening he allows himself to speak three sentences to me. The first, a question about my day. The second, about food. The third, Dayita. Each requires no more than a one-word answer.

  At some point in my life I will look back at these evenings and laugh. I must believe this. I must believe this.

  Anju springs up from her chair. “Just remembered—this came in the mail today.” She hands Sunil the envelope. “Who’s it from?”

  “Chopra? He’s one of my clients. His company went public last year. Made a bunch of money, built a huge house up in Los Altos Hills.” Sunil fingers the heavy parchment appreciatively. Or is it envy in that lingering touch? He opens the card. “It’s an invitation to his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.”

  “When is it?” Anju asks.

  “Next weekend. We were obviously an afterthought.” For a moment his expression veers toward anger.

  “Then maybe we shouldn’t go. Besides, we’d have to buy a gift—”

  Anju breaks off. She doesn’t want to talk finances in front of me. Doesn’t want me to feel uncomfortable. But I know already.

  I heard them once, while nursing Dayita in the back room. Furious whispers.

  She: There’s only a hundred and fifty dollars left in our checking account.

  He: You’ll have to make do with it until I get my paycheck on the fifteenth.

  She: I don’t know how I can. I have to get groceries, diapers, baby vitamins. Why can’t you send a little less each month to your folks in India?

  He: That’s not possible.

  She: Why not? It’s not like your dad’s hurting for money. Doesn’t he own—what is it?—two rental properties? And here we are, living in this dump of an apartment….

  He: We’ve talked about this a hundred times. I’m not going to discuss it again. You knew money was tight. You should have thought about it before you invited your cousin to stay with us.

  She: How can you compare your dad’s situation to Sudha’s? She really needed to get away, start over. And I needed her with me. How can you grudge us this one thing? What else have I ever asked you for? What else have you ever given me?

  He: (Silence)

  She: (Silence).

  Sunil looks down, examining the invitation. Is he thinking of his own wedding, the years it has lasted, the years it might not last?

  “We’ll go,” he says finally, uncreasing his forehead. “We’ll go and see how the rich live. Why not?” He looks at me. A rare, direct glance. A challenge glitters in them. “You, too. After all, you’re part of Sunil Majumdar and Family. Aren’t you?”

  We sit on the bedroom floor among piles of clothing. Anju has pulled out our suitcases from under her bed, and we are trying to decide what to wear. We go through mine quickly—there’s only a few starched cottons in there. I had to leave all my expensive saris behind when I left Ramesh’s house. Anju’s suitcase, though, is filled with her trousseau. Whipped clouds of chiffon and chinon. Fragile Dhakai cottons in monsoon colors. Regal Benarasis, stiff with zari thread. Touch of another lifetime on my skin, to which there is no returning.

  “Look how lovely this still is,” I say, picking up the sari Anju got married in. Sprays of gold flowers on royal red. So out of place in this two-room apartment, its shag-haired carpet mangy from my enthusiastic vacuuming.

  “There’s nothing like our Indian fabrics,” Anju says. “No wonder you wanted to become a clothing designer!”

  I wince. It’s painful to be reminded of dreams that came to nothing. “Stop!” I tell Dayita, who is burrowing into the suitcase, tangling gauzes and satins. She rubs her face on an expensive Kanchipuram silk, undeterred by my shouts. Does she smell the presence of our young selves in the woodsy sandal powder? When I grab for her, she hides behind Anju.

  “Oh, quit!” says Anju. “You’re always scolding my sweet Dayu for nothing!” She turns to Dayita and drapes the edge of an embroidered veil over her head. “Don’t you look pretty! Sunil, Sunil, come see our little bride!”

  Tomorrow Anju will stop at the bank and take out her wedding jewelry to share between us. My jewelry is still in my ex-husband’s family vault—or being worn by his new wife. Sometimes, because I think I should, I try to feel outrage. But her image is too far away, a tiny reflection at the bottom of a well. How can I envy it? In my imagination, she has the same cowed look as Ramesh.

  “Sue them,” Anju said on my first day here, talking like an American. Angry sweat on her upper lip. Her thick eyebrows drawn together. She had forgotten how things are back home. How a runaway wife has no rights.

  “I paid it in exchange for my daughter’s life,” I told her.

  Anju bit her lip to stop the tears. “The bastard.” She was always more angry with Ramesh than with my mother-in-law. “Never mind. Everything I have is yours, too.”

  Are other people haunted by words as I am? A prickly wind on my skin, making me shiver. Everything?

  I shouldn’t go to this party. The wisest thing would be to pretend to be sick on that day. But I don’t want to be wise.

  I pick out a gray sari with a thin silver border, ambiguous enough for a woman whose marital status is questionable. But Anju will have none of it.

  “It’s a wedding anniversary, for heaven’s sake, not a funeral!” she says. She chooses for me a lovely, deep silk colored like a peacock’s throat, embroidered all over with tiny gold moons. “That’s a great color on you.” She turns to Sunil, who has come to look at Dayita. “Don’t you agree?”

  “Yes,” says Sunil tersely. He tries to pick Dayita up, but she won’t go, not until he tempts her by holding out his keys. There’s a Mickey Mouse on the chain. It squeaks when he presses its stomach, making my daughter laugh and lunge for it. “Sleepytime,” Sunil says, and picks her up. I stare after him in reluctant admiration. How many men would put a Mickey Mouse on their key chain just to please a little girl?

  “And I have that necklace with a peacock pendant, and those earrings, you remember them, that match the sari. It’ll make you look quite stunning,” Anju says.

  Anju, can’t you smell the storm?

  I choose for her a peach silk like the morning sky, the color of innocence. I tell her she must wear it with the jewelry set Gouri Ma gave her at the blessing ceremony before the wedding—tiny, twinkling diamonds set into filigreed gold.

  Anju hesitates. “Don’t you think it’s too showy?”

  “It’s a wedding anniversary, for heaven’s sake, not a funeral!”

  We burst out laughing, filled with sudden, girlish excitement.

  But later in bed I think. He had said, You’re part of Sunil Majumdar and Family. Aren’t you?

  “Of course she is,” Anju had replied, “and our Dayu as well. We must take her, too.” She was looking at the invitation, did it say anything about not bringing children. She didn’t see his eyes. Possession wound its way around me like a nylon line, impossible to break.

  I should have said no right then.

  I call up the necklace that Anju will wear, its sprinkle of stars clear against the dark air of my room. For a moment I’m in the wedding tent again, the humid, heavy air smelling of sweat and incense and wilting marigolds. Gouri Ma’s fingers fumbling for a moment with the catch of the necklace, the way she stroked Anju’s hair afterward as her lips moved inaudibly, invoking divine protection.

  Pray hard, I beg her. Pray hard enough, Gouri Ma, to deflect fate.

  Ten

  Sunil

  Today I’m not going to talk about your mother, kid. Not one word. I’m going to tell you a whole different kind of story. It’s from a long time ago, when I was a boy, maybe ten, maybe eleven, going to school in Calcutta. There’s a lot I’ve forgotten about the story, but I’ll leave the gaps as they are. I don’t want to make anything up, not for you. Between you and me, kid, it’s always going to
be the truth.

  And if there’s a time when I can’t give you that, I’ll say nothing at all.

  So, picture me, kiddo: a scabby boy with pencil-thin arms and legs, khaki half-pants, white shirt—the school uniform of Deshbandhu Boys School, except my shirt’s always torn or smeared with mud from the football field, and my mother’s always mending and washing and ironing, tensely and in secret, so my father won’t give me one of his long, deadly speeches about carelessness and inconsideration and do I think money grows on trees. I’ve just gotten off the school bus, I’m running to the house as fast as I can, holding up a pink notice the teacher has given me, which I hand to my mother. Her smile collapses into worry as she reads it because what that notice tells her is that the teachers of Deshbandhu Boys School are planning to take the boys to the theater next week to see a matinee show of Puro-hit O Pradip, which they believe will promote excellent moral values in their charges, and can the parents kindly send ten rupees fifty paise with the students by day after tomorrow for tickets and bus fare.

  That’s ten rupees fifty paise more than my mother has, because in our house, my father is the one who handles the cash, who gives bazaar money each morning to Manik, our servant, before leaving for the office, and takes back the change, along with detailed accounts that had better be accurate to the last paisa, from him in the evening. And who doesn’t look favorably on my mother asking him for frivolities, as a trip to the theater surely is.

  I’m tempted to insert a scene here about my mother begging my father for the money, about him ranting and raving and finally refusing, of my mother having to make a secret trip to her cousin in Belgachia, as she sometimes did, for a loan. She was a kind woman, the Belgachia cousin. Whenever we visited, she gave us narus made from jaggery and coconut, and cold water in tall stainless-steel glasses to which beads of condensation clung. And she always allowed my mother to pretend that she’d be able to return the money soon. At the time of my wedding, I bought her a very fancy silk sari, which annoyed my father no end. But I’m digressing.