The Vine of Desire: A Novel Read online

  She loved speaking to Prem. In an illogical way, it was more satisfying than speaking to Sunil, even though Sunil was a careful listener and made the right comments at the right times. But Prem—the way he grew still at the sound of her voice, the way he butted her ribs with his head if she paused too long in the middle of a story …

  She told Prem about the old house, that white elephant of a mansion that had been in the Chatterjee family for generations: its crumbling marble façade, its peeling walls, the dark knots of its corridors, the brick terrace where she and Sudha went secretly at night to watch for falling stars to wish on.

  “It’s gone now. Demolished to make space for a high-rise apartment building. And I’m the one who kept at your grandmothers—do you know you have three grandmothers: my mom, Sudha’s mom, and Pishi, who’s my dad’s sister?—to sell it. I used to hate that house, how ancient it was, how it stood for everything ancient. I hated being cooped up in it and not allowed to go anywhere except school. But now I miss it! I think of my room with its cool, high ceilings, and my bedsheets, which always smelled clean, like neem leaves—and which I never had to wash myself!—and the hundred-year-old peepal trees that grew outside my windows. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t been in such a hurry to come to America. Sudha used to sneak into my room at night sometimes. We’d sit on the wide windowsill, telling each other stories. I’d tell her about characters in books I’d read that I liked, such as Jo in Little Women—and she’d tell me the folk tales she’d heard from Pishi about women who would turn into demonesses at night and the monkey who was actually a bewitched prince. She was great at doing voices! You’ll see it for yourself when she gets here.”

  Some days, after the doctor had scolded her for not getting enough exercise, Anju went to the park. She would make a desultory round of the play area, watching the children, whispering to Prem that he’d be better than them all—more handsome, more active, and of course more intelligent. She would tell him how prettily the maples were changing color and then, choosing one to sit under, she would go back to her childhood.

  “My favorite place of all was the family bookstore. For the longest time all I wanted was to be allowed to run it when I grew up. Every weekend I’d beg Mother to take me there. I loved its smell of new paper and printing ink, its rows and rows of books all the way to the ceiling, its little ladders that the clerks would scramble up when a customer wanted something that was stored on a high shelf. There was a special corner with an armchair, just for me, so I could sit and read all I wanted. It was funny, Gouri Ma—that’s my mom—was strict about a lot of things, but she never stopped me from reading anything I wanted.

  “So in my teenage years, I read things like Anna Karenina and Sons and Lovers and The Great Gatsby and A Room of One’s Own. I’m glad I did, but maybe Aunt Nalini—that’s Sudha’s mom—was right. They were no good for me. They filled me with a dissatisfaction with my own life, and a longing for distant places. I believed that, if I could only get out of Calcutta to one of those exotic countries I read about, it would transform me. But transformation isn’t so easy, is it?”

  What about the other places of her growing-up years? The ones she never spoke of, the ones you’d have to eavesdrop among her dreams to find? Such as: the banquet hall where she saw her new husband stoop to pick up a woman’s handkerchief that was not hers? But the rest of that scene is brittle and brown and unreadable, like the edge of a paper held to a flame, another of those memories Anju keeps hostage in the darkest cells of her mind.

  “The bookstore was where I met your father. He had come dressed in an old-fashioned kurta and gold-rimmed glasses—a kind of disguise so that I wouldn’t guess that he was the computer whiz from America with whom Gouri Ma was trying to arrange my marriage.

  “He’d come to check me out! Can you imagine! People just didn’t do such things in Calcutta, at least not in traditional families like mine. When he confessed who he was, I was terribly impressed. But what made me fall in crazy love with him was that he bought a whole set of the novels of Virginia Woolf. She used to be my favorite author, you know. But he’d done it only to win me over.” She sighed. “Later I couldn’t get him to read even one of them!

  “Still—he’s going to be a wonderful father to you. I’m sure of that. He’ll love you more than anyone else does—except of course me and your Sudha-aunty!”

  This evening, her dinner uneaten, Anju pushes back her chair and walks over to the old, discolored mirror that hangs in the small bathroom in the passage. She runs an uncertain hand through her hair and touches the dark circles under her eyes. She presses down on her jagged cheekbones—she’s lost a lot of weight since the miscarriage—as though she could push them in and hide them. “God, I look like such a witch!” she groans.

  Last week she opened her India suitcase and took out a framed picture of herself and Sudha at their school graduation dinner. She examined it for a long moment before setting it on her dresser with a dissatisfied thunk. Even at that heedlessly happy time in her life, she hadn’t been pretty in the traditional way. She didn’t have her cousin’s rush of curly hair, or those wide, sooty eyes which always looked a little mysterious, a little tragic. But anyone could see (anyone except herself, that is) that she had spirit. In the photo, she stares out, a challenge in her eyes. She crooks her lean, stubborn mouth in a half-smile. There’s an irrepressible intelligence to her nose. Maybe that was what made Sunil choose her from among all the girls he could have had as an eminently eligible, foreign-returned, computer-whiz groom in Calcutta.

  But somewhere along the way Anju’s eyes grew dull and muddy. Her mouth learned to twitch. And the expression on Sunil’s face when he watches her nowadays—he does this in bed, sometimes, after she has fallen asleep—is complicated. At times it is pity. At times, regret.

  All through the fall of her pregnancy, while the leaves of the maple turned a crisper, brittler red until they were suddenly gone, Anju told Prem stories of Sudha. Beautiful Sudha, the dreamer, the best cook of them all, the magic-fingered girl who could embroider clothes fit for a queen. Luckless Sudha, who worked so hard at being the perfect wife to Ramesh even though she didn’t love him. Until the day she walked out of the marriage.

  “It was because of her witch of a mother-in-law. For years she’d been harassing Sudha because she couldn’t get pregnant. You’d think she’d be delighted when she found out that Sudha was having a baby. But no. She had to have an ultrasound done, and when she discovered that her first grandchild was going to be a girl, she insisted that Sudha should have an abortion. So Sudha ran away—how else could she save her daughter—though she knew they’d make her life hell afterward.

  “Oh, that old crocodile! How I wish I could have seen her when she woke up to find Sudha gone!”

  For weeks afterward, Anju would describe that afternoon for Prem, over and over, in the hushed tone one saves for legends.

  The entire household has fallen into a stunned sleep, even the servants. The heavy front door, which is carved with fierce yakshas wielding swords, opens without a sound. Sudha slips out, carrying only a small handbag. She wears her cotton house sari and forces herself not to hurry so passersby will not be suspicious. The air inside her chest is viscous with fear. Her slippers slide on the gravelly road. Mango leaves hang dispiritedly in the heat, like small, tired hands. She walks carefully, she mustn’t fall, she presses her hand against a belly that will start to show in a few weeks. At the crossroads she pulls the end of her sari over her head in a veil, a princess disguised as a servant maid, so no one on the street will recognize her.

  “What about Ramesh?” Sunil asked when Anju told him Sudha had gone back to her mother.

  “What about him?” Anju said, her voice dangerously tight.

  “Didn’t he try to bring her back?”

  “Him! That spineless jellyfish! That mama’s boy!” Anju’s breath came in outraged puffs. “He did nothing—nothing he should have done, that is.”

  There was a doubtful lo
ok on Sunil’s face. Was he wondering if there was more to Ramesh than Anju saw? If Ramesh wept for Sudha and the baby daughter he would never hold—carefully and quietly, in the shower, under cover of running water so no one would hear? At night, did his hand reach across the bed from old habit? And when he startled awake, was the taste in his mouth like iron? But Sunil knew better than to share such thoughts with Anju.

  The following week, when he came back from work, she handed him an aerogram, triumphant with outrage. “Look!” It was from Aunt Nalini, informing them that Sudha had been served with divorce papers. The papers had Ramesh’s signature on them and accused Sudha of desertion.

  What a dastardly trick! Aunt Nalini wrote. Now the poor girl won’t get a single paisa from them. They’ve even refused to return the dowry I gave her at the wedding—a dowry for which I scrimped and saved and deprived myself of pleasure my entire life, as I’m sure you remember.

  “Is it really as bad as she makes it out to be?” Sunil asked.

  And Anju, who would usually sigh and roll her eyes after reading one of Aunt Nalini’s missives (“Missiles,” she sometimes called them), snapped, “Of course it is. What makes you think otherwise?”

  “Well, didn’t you yourself say that she was Drama Queen Number One?”

  She ignored the comment. “If I could just get my hands on Ramesh! That jerk! You remember him at the wedding, his hair all glossed down with Brylcreem? He couldn’t take his eyes off Sudha. I remember thinking, He’s ugly, but at least he’ll be good to her. And now, just look!” She was pacing the room by now, panting a little.

  “Please calm down,” Sunil said, his reasonable voice giving away nothing of what he might be feeling. “It’s not good for you to get so worked up at this time.”

  “Isn’t that just like a man,” Anju said, kicking furiously at the doorjamb. “To stand up for other men, no matter what they’ve done.”

  “When did I—”

  “Never mind,” said Anju. She didn’t speak to him the rest of the evening. The next day she said, “I want to bring Sudha to America.”

  The words crashed into him like waves. He thought they might pull him out to sea. “And where’s the money for that going to come from?” he said. Though money wasn’t what he was worried about. But what he was worried about couldn’t be spoken.

  They had their first fight that day. Others followed in the weeks after. Thunderclouds of colliding words. Sobs. A stiff silence. A door kicked shut.

  She started working secretly at the university library. She put her earnings in the bank and hid the savings book between layers of her saris. Each night her spine ached, the pain like an electric current moving up and down it, stopping wherever it wanted. “As soon as I have a thousand dollars, I’ll send Sudha a ticket,” she whispered to Prem as she made herself a bed on the lumpy couch. Her smile carved the dark like a thin, defiant moon. “Men! It’s best not to count on them for anything important.”

  She rubbed her stomach gently, forcing herself to relax. “Present company excepted, of course,” she added.

  She didn’t know that he, too, would fail her. In the worst way of all.

  Anju abandons the mirror to pace the tiny apartment. In old yellow socks, her feet make a padding, caged-animal sound on the linoleum. She ends up in the kitchen, where she takes several eggs from the refrigerator. She breaks them into a bowl and begins rummaging around for a fork. She is not a good housekeeper. In spite of the efforts she has been making to tidy up for Sudha, the kitchen counters are a shamble of dishes that haven’t been put away and propped-open books and spices still in their torn plastic packets. Finally she gives up and takes a dirty fork out of the dishwasher, holds it for a perfunctory moment under the tap, and begins to beat the eggs.

  “Anju! What on earth are you doing?” Irritation ripples along Sunil’s voice like a sleeve of fire.

  “I thought I’d bake something for Sudha,” she answers uncertainly. “Maybe a devil’s food cake—it’ll be something new for her….”

  Sunil moves with an athlete’s grace, stepping lightly on the balls of his feet. How fast he is! Already he has reached her. There’s something frightening in the way he holds his hands, stiff and suppressed, close to his body. But she isn’t afraid. There’s a feverish exhilaration in her eyes. I dare you. But he merely pushes past her to swing the refrigerator open.

  “Look!” The cords in his neck are tight with his need to shout, but he speaks softly. “Haven’t you done enough?”

  She looks. The refrigerator is stuffed with dishes: spaghetti and meatballs, potato salad, tuna casserole, banana bread, vanilla pudding, apple pie. All the recipes she looked up painstakingly in her Good Housekeeping cookbook. It is the most Indian of ways, what the women of her family had done to show love through the years of her childhood, that simple time which she longs for more and more as her adult plans seem to collapse around her. There’s too much food, far more than Sudha can ever eat. Food that will spoil over the next week and have to be stuffed down the garbage disposal covertly, while Sunil is at work.

  For a moment husband and wife glare at each other across the cold white spillage of refrigerator light, their faces too young, surely, to hold the tired rage stamped onto them. She grips the edge of the bowl as though she might fling it at him. Then, with a shaky laugh, she rubs her sticky knuckles across her eyes.

  “I guess I did go a bit overboard,” she says.

  “It’s only natural,” he says, his voice quickly, carefully kind. “After all, it’s the first time she’s visiting us, and you want it to be special.” There’s relief in the sag of his shoulders. The last months have been hard on him, too, not knowing when she might burst into racked weeping, or retreat to bed to wrap herself in one of her relentless silences. He puts an arm around her. “Come sleep now.” When she hesitates, he adds, “Don’t you want to be bright and fresh tomorrow, when your cousin gets here?” And she, a faraway look on her face, allows him to take the milky-yellow mess of eggs from her and lead her to their bedroom.

  Ashok. He’s the one Anju never speaks of. Not to Sunil. Not even to Prem. The other man in Sudha’s life, her forbidden childhood sweetheart. Is Anju secretly jealous of him? Is that why her thoughts stray to him more often than she likes? She imagines him as a teenager still, tall and gangly in a starched white shirt, his chest caving in a little. Meanly, she exaggerates his buckteeth as he waits shyly on a Calcutta pavement for Sudha to pass by. How foolishly crazy Sudha had been about him—in private, of course, such things weren’t allowed in their family. Why, she’d almost eloped with him! Docile Sudha! But fortunately (that is the right word, isn’t it?), at the last moment, she came to her senses.

  Anju remembers with painful clarity the night on which Sudha told her that she had decided not to run away with Ashok. Anju had been sitting alone on the windowsill in her bedroom thinking of Sunil, whom she had just met. The sky was very dark—perhaps there had been a power cut in the city—and the stars seemed closer than usual. She made an arch with her hands and held it up to her eyes. She believed her life was going to be like what she saw: a safe and contained brilliance, a beauty that extended outward forever. When Sudha came up silently and put her hand on the back of her neck, she had jumped, startled. She had been that far away. Perhaps that was why she didn’t question her cousin more closely, though it had surprised her when Sudha said she was afraid to take such a big risk. What if things didn’t work out with Ashok? Sudha had said, looking away, her words falling from her all at once, like a bucket of water thrown out of a window. What would I do then? And Anju, intoxicated with her own thoughts, had said, quickly, You’re right. It’s better this way. Now, thinking of all that happened afterward, she wonders if she had said the wrong thing. She remembers Sudha’s fingertips on the base of her neck, trailing feverish entreaties she’d been too much in love to hear.

  Last month, Ashok asked Sudha once again to marry him. In spite of the divorce, in spite of the baby. It was something unhear
d-of in families like theirs.

  “I’m delighted for Sudha,” Anju said to Sunil when she got the news. Her face was pale and puffy, as though she’d been crying. “Truly, I am. I told her she should accept him. I told her that I’m better now, that I can manage here without her.”

  Sunil—wise man—said nothing.

  Then Sudha wrote back to say that she had turned Ashok down. That she was coming to America.

  “I feel terribly guilty,” Anju told Sunil.

  “You look pretty cheerful.”

  She gave him a wounded look. “One can be guilty and happy at the same time. I can’t help thinking she gave him up because she feels she has to take care of me.”

  “I don’t know why she needs to feel that way. Aren’t I here for you?”

  “Silly!” she said, smiling. She gave him a hug—something she didn’t do too often since the miscarriage. “Of course you are! But Sudha—well, things between her and me are different.”

  At night, before she falls asleep, Anju makes a wish: that Ashok will be intelligent enough to wait for Sudha until she returns to India. At the same time she wishes that Sudha will stay on with her in America forever. Does she realize that her wishes, clashing as they attempt to rise from our sublunary plane to the ears of the gods, cancel each other out?

  The beautiful Sudha. But what have we really learned about her? Only the externals, the snow that cloaks a mountain in an illusion of sleep while an entire world of actions continues below. Small creatures moving through invisible burrows, larger ones crouched, waiting, in caves. The leap, the sinking in of teeth, the outcomes that sometimes astonish but more often merely sadden. And at the center, the earth itself, rock and mud and pressed seep of glacier. Who knows if it’s readying itself for another shift, one that will end, this time, in avalanche? Or in a scarlet eruption that turns the land to ash?

  The subterranean truths of Sudha’s life are the ones we crave.