The Vine of Desire: A Novel Read online

  “Would you like me to comb your hair?” Sunil asks.

  They are in their nightclothes, Anju sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the photograph. She seems not to have heard him, but she does not protest when he begins moving the comb through her hair with long, gentle strokes, nor when, after a little while, he lays it down to kiss her shoulders, then her throat, and finally, tentatively—for since the miscarriage nine months ago she hasn’t been able to stand him touching her in that way—her lips.

  But today she kisses him back—or at least she holds still while he kisses her, while his fingers unbutton her nightdress. Then she asks him to turn off the light.

  “But why? It’s only the night lamp—you’ve always liked it.”

  She shudders in the lamp’s deep blue shadow, pulling the bedsheet up to her neck. “I hate how my body looks. Everything slumps. The bones push out in all the wrong places—”

  “Oh, Anju! You’re exaggerating,” he protests, but he gets out of bed to turn off the light. She watches his lean back crisscrossed with shadows, the simple arrogance of his muscles, bending. Her eyes find the photograph once again.

  He kisses her eyes shut with determination. She opens her lips obediently under his. She wants them to succeed as much as he does, to be back where they were before—but where was that? She’s losing her thoughts in a rainbow fog, the start of a headache at the base of her skull. Still, when he says, “Remember that afternoon at the Rabindra Sarobar when I kissed you for the first time, how shy you were,” she says yes. Although in truth she can’t remember it. She tries hard to pull up a detail from the crumbly quicksand of her memory: Was it sunny? Was the sky filled with clouds like puffed rice? Were children floating paper boats on the lake? Was there a Lalmohan bird, crying from a branch above? He’s waiting for her to add something. (What?) She says, “The palash flowers had dropped their crimson petals all across the water,” then realizes guiltily that it couldn’t have been so, she had been married in winter, he would have left for America long before the first buds opened.

  So she presses her face against his, and holds herself beneath him the way he likes her to. But his weight on her is cold and enormous, a giant statue, made of concrete, except that it moves. His breath is like a furnace opening onto her face with its bitter coal smell. The ache at the base of her skull has grown into a voice, calling, even though calling is of no use. Prem Prem Prem, until she pushes him off and feels the failure, thick as slush, settle in his bones. She opens her mouth to tell him she’s sorry, she knows how hard he tried. She tried hard, too. But she just can’t. And remembering how it had been once was no good, it would never be that way again, even if they were able to stitch up this chasm of a wound that runs jagged between the length of their bodies now. But she must have said something quite different because he pulls back and looks at her, asking in an angry voice, “What do you mean, you’ve got to make it up to Sudha for what she’s sacrificing to come here to you?”

  Anju doesn’t answer. He knows what she means, she knows that. But always, where Sudha is concerned, he likes to act obtuse, likes to force her to explain, to drag out the emotions inside of her, unclothed, so they look sentimental, or superstitious, or plain foolish. Well, this time she isn’t going to do it. She lies there mutinous, lips pressed together, thinking about Ashok. All those years he waited for Sudha when she was married to someone else. Was it out of love, or the fear of loving again? I told him no, Sudha had written. Anju twists a strand of hair around her finger distractedly until it snaps, wondering about that no. Could she have said it, in Sudha’s place? If she weighed a man’s devotion against a cousin’s need, the security he offered against uncertainty, which is all she has to give Sudha, which way would the scales tip? She needs to think it through, and she cannot do it here, with Sunil’s hand snaking from behind to cup her breast, his arm pulling her back against a chest that smells of Claiborne Sport, a tangy scent she once loved that now makes her feel slightly sick. But of course she can never tell him that. Does such consideration rise from caring, or merely habit? This, too, she needs to think about.

  She can feel him now, grown hard against her. A nuclear heat radiates from his bones. Escape, escape. She gathers up her nightdress in alarmed handfuls. From the sudden stillness of his body, his hands falling away, she knows she has offended him. He won’t try to stop her. He’s too proud for that. She slips silently from the bed—what good are words now, even if she could come up with the right ones?—and gropes her way next door, where she lies down in the bed she has prepared for the cousin who’s like a breathlessness inside her.

  And her husband, does she love him? She turns the question, hard as a nugget of iron, around and around in her head. Ultimately she cannot imagine a life without him—and what else is that but love? She keeps her eyes averted from the crib Sunil has set up for Dayita. Ah, there’s another problem, the child whom she doesn’t want in her house. She’s afraid she might start loving her, and that would be a betrayal of the dead. How is she to manage it, to pretend that the child does not exist? How is she to keep Dayita at arm’s length without hurting Sudha? When she finally stumbles into sleep, her dreams are a chiaroscuro of uneasy strategies.

  It is the year of accounting, the year of pardons, the year of uneasy alliances. Somewhere in America a man is sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of a black activist thirty years ago. Somewhere in India a bandit queen is released after eleven years in jail. Somewhere in Russia a cosmonaut is preparing to go into space, for the first time in the history of nations, on an American rocketship.

  But here is Sunil, alone in his bedroom. Is he asleep, too? No. In the blue night-light he has turned back on, his eyes are chips of stone. They glitter with a strange resignation. Under the sheet, his hand moves as he stares at Anju’s graduation photograph. A rapid blur of movement until his body stiffens and arcs, then slumps down into itself, and he whispers a name into the pillow his wife has left empty. A moth-wing of a name.

  Sudha.

  It was her picture he’d been looking at, all this time.

  But he whispered the name rather than calling it out in passion. Can we salvage a broken bit of hope from that? Out of consideration for Anju, he had whispered the name of the woman he’d been trying all this time to keep away. The woman he’d been mad for ever since he saw her in a garden tented with jasmine—too late, for by then he was already betrothed to her cousin.

  But was it consideration, or was it fear? No, not fear. Not that. For there is one thing about Sunil that even Anju knows: he is not afraid of anyone—except perhaps himself.

  Two

  Sudha

  We run barefoot on sand, impatient for water. Our hurry makes a small wind. It is the color of our saris, which stream behind us like the eager start of a fire. We are dressed in the same color—one of the many childhood habits Anju and I have fallen back into. Today we wear rebel red. It is a color that belongs to married women, one I have forfeited. I wear it with defiance.

  I reach the ocean first. My first ocean. My sari is bunched up at my knees like a heedless schoolgirl’s. The spray is soap and ice, and smells of sea horses. I imagine them somewhere deep and green, swaying. My toes curl in exhilaration. Anju has fallen behind, out of breath. Her panting sounds like the edge of a blade. She clutches at her side surreptitiously. She doesn’t want me to see. Anju, who used to be so strong. My banyan tree. Since the miscarriage, she startles at moths, echoes, the greetings of strangers. I force myself to smile. No tears, no tears now. Once we had known everything about each other. My smile is a bland expanse of white, dead as the shells underfoot. But loss has made Anju incapable of detecting such things. She holds out her hand. I take it. Together we step into the sea.

  He is carefully not watching us. He busies himself with amusing Dayita. Making funny faces. She gurgles at him and tries to grab his nose. He laughs and lets her, though her nails will leave sharp red moon-marks on his skin. When he looks at her, there is an odd gr
atitude on his face.

  Each evening, coming home from the office, he goes straight to her crib to pick her up. Even before he takes off his shoes. He refuses to put her down the rest of the evening. Anju says, Sunil, you’re spoiling her. He acts as if he doesn’t hear. Even while he eats dinner or works at the computer, he balances Dayita easily, on one knee. His arm loops lightly around her. She grabs his spoon just as he brings it to his mouth. She swats at the keyboard, deleting crucial data. He smiles. Anju tells me he’s never been a patient man. He has surprised us all. Himself, too, I think. He only releases my daughter when I have to nurse her. He puts her down on the floor, so his hands won’t touch mine as I pick her up.

  Later he lies on the bed with Dayita on his chest. He tells her all kinds of things. All the things he doesn’t talk to Anju about. The project he’s working on. The accident he saw on the freeway. The places he plans to take her soon. He riffles his fingers through her curls and gives her an edited version of the daily news. He tells her the plots of movies he saw growing up in India. He changes her diapers without consulting us, though we’re waiting to help.

  I am jealous for Anju, who watches from the doorway.

  And Dayita, who drives us crazy all day, crawling into corners, getting stuck under the bed, throwing tantrums every two minutes: she basks on his chest, listening to what happened on the stock market. Her iridescent eyes shine, the color of chameleons.

  “When he’s with Dayita,” Anju tells me later, “all the bitterness falls away from him. He used to be like that when I was pregnant. Boyish and excited and tender. He’d make a world of plans—all the things he wanted to do for—” she swallows—“Prem. He would put his mouth against my stomach to whisper them. If only I’d been more careful—”

  “There’s no point in torturing yourself over what’s happened already,” I say, as I have many times.

  Useless words, falling between us like lopsided snowflakes. Melting.

  “Somehow I feel I’ll never get another chance to be a mother,” Anju says. Her voice is toneless, it moves like a sleepwalker. “This child, he came to me too easily, and I was too casual about him. I’m going to have to pay for that….”

  I’m frightened by that sleepwalker voice, its thin, icy glide. “What superstition!” I say, choosing harder words, clipping them close like nails. “You never used to be this way. Listen to you—you sound like my mother! Of course you’ll have more children. And isn’t Dayita your own, too? Even Sunil can see that—why can’t you?”

  “Yes,” Anju says. It is a sound like a sigh. But what is she agreeing with?

  There are things she doesn’t tell me about her marriage. I see their shadows on the wall, shivery-brown and thin, like diseased branches. I try vainly to untangle silhouettes.

  We do not discuss him again.

  It began on the very first night, the night Dayita and I came into their house. I know because I dreamed it.

  So much talk and tears. So much catching up with pain. So much still left unsaid between Anju and me, that would perhaps never be spoken. We were afraid to touch each other’s pasts, the way one is with a cut that’s just stopped bleeding. We read, in each other’s eyes, the questions that couldn’t be asked, couldn’t be answered. Why did you really bring me here? Why did you really say no to him? We fell to sleep exhausted on the carpet in my new room. Lying between us, lulled by our voices, my daughter, too, slept awhile. Then she awoke.

  In the living room he was sitting at his computer. Staring at the screen, which for once could not save him from his thoughts. A can of Coke, gone warm and flat, stood untouched beside him. He wanted whiskey, though he wasn’t a drinker. Whiskey to dull the points of all those thoughts whizzing at his head like jugglers’ knives. But that would have been a victory for the women. (The women, that’s how he thought of us.) An admission that we’d gotten under his skin.

  Sleepless in front of that opal flicker, he felt thankfulness. He could see that, with my coming, some of the sadness had fallen from Anju. But he was annoyed, too. We made him feel unnecessary. At dinner I had enquired about his work. Anju had asked if he wanted more lasagna, more pudding. Still, he knew he was an interruption to our reunion.

  The last knife, the last thought. When it struck him, a tense joy spurted forth. To him I was more beautiful than before. He wanted to lick away the worry lines at the corners of my eyes. Like a glass flower, blossomed in fire. The words hummed like wasps inside his skull. He was light-headed with his need to take care of me, and knew he must not.

  He heard the snuffling noises Dayita was making. At first he didn’t know what to do. Should he let her cry until we awoke? But that might take forever. The poor child was starving—he could tell by her shrillness. He stepped gingerly into the room. He tried to keep his eyes away. There’s a nakedness about sleeping people—Anju and I lay with our arms around each other, as if we were girls again. Needy, unabashed. We embarrassed him.

  But here was Dayita, kicking with vigor. Screeching like an entire chorus of harpies. Her face was splotched more with rage than hunger. For the first time since we came, he was amused. You don’t like being ignored either, do you? He leaned carefully over us to pick her up. It amazed him how light she was. And yet how solid, how real. Suddenly it was very important not to wake us. To have her to himself. She was quiet now. She stared at him, her eyes smoky with intelligence. She knew all the ways, he thought, in which he was hurting.

  Shyly he laid his cheek on Dayita’s head. Curly, pulsing. She smelled like every baby on earth. Like herself only. Like grass. He was thinking—he didn’t allow himself to do that often—of Prem.

  He fed her with the baby formula I had kept in the refrigerator. There was a rhythm to her sucking, a code he needed to decipher. He changed her and put her in the middle of his bed. He piled all the pillows he could find around her to keep her safe. Until he fell asleep he talked to her. Nonsense words at first, then adult to adult. He told her he was afraid of what might happen to us all in the next few months. He used words like craziness. Conflagration. He didn’t mention my name to my daughter. (Of that I am thankful.) But he was happy she was here. He wanted her especially to know that.

  That was how we found them in the morning. Sleep-entangled. Her arm flung over his eyes. His urgent hand grasping her foot as though she might fly away in the night. The way his Prem had once done.

  I am not the only one in this house who dreams.

  “Almost every night before you came,” Anju tells me, “I used to have a nightmare.” She stammers a little, shamefaced, as she describes it.

  A point of light travels across a swirl of ink-blue. Its arc is serene, confident. It takes her a moment to recognize it: a planet in orbit. Then, from nowhere, another light, bigger and brighter and streaming fire. It hurls itself into the planet’s path. In a moment they will collide, shatter into nothingness. She moans and flails her sleeping arms, trying to avert the catastrophe. The giant meteor crashes into the planet—but there’s no explosion. Instead, the planet is thrown from its orbit. It falls spinning past the edge of the dream, flat as a coin, naive as a child’s cutout. The meteor takes its place, bristling with heat and life. Anju waits for someone to notice this treachery, to do something about it. All continues as before. The Milky Way shimmers, joyous chords swell in the background. She wakes with an ache in her throat, as though she’s swallowed a piece of bone.

  “I’ve finally figured it out,” Anju says. “I was visualizing Dayita as the meteor and Prem as the planet. I was afraid she would take my poor boy’s place, make me forget him. But it’s amazing, isn’t it, the way the heart expands when it needs to? I’m so glad you forced me, those first few days, to hold her, to feed her. Did you realize how scared I was? But now it’s like buds opening on a branch that I’d given up for dead. Not that I don’t think of Prem—I do, all the time. I think I always will. But it’s different, having a baby I can hold with my hands.”

  Her face was hot and requesting. She want
ed consolation, a hug at the very least. She deserved it. It was hard for her to talk of such things. But I couldn’t.

  “What time is it?” I said stiffly. “We’d better start dinner.” Her eyes went shiny with hurt.

  Later in the bathroom, in the middle of combing my hair, I came to a halt. Stared at the mirror a long time. I bundled all the strands into a tight, ugly knot, and took off my earrings. The dream had another meaning, though Anju didn’t recognize it. Some fears are like that, slippery and deep down as mudfish.

  The planet was Anju herself.

  If so, was I the meteor?

  In the late afternoon we return laughing and wet, our legs powdered with grains of gold.

  I give an exaggerated shiver. “You never told me that the American ocean was going to be so cold!”

  “Whine, whine!” says Anju, giving me a little push. There’s a new redness in her cheeks, something for me to hold on to. “Who was it that wouldn’t leave the water? Who was it that kept saying, Oh, Anju, we’ve got to wait for another wave?”

  I push back a tangle of strands from my face, the knot undone by wind. My hair smells like a holiday. “I was hoping to find a sea horse.”

  There’s a sudden attentiveness in his face. He would like to know why. But he doesn’t ask. Ever since I arrived, he has been cool and aloof. Never starting a conversation. Keeping out of my way—as though that’s possible in a two-room apartment. Awkwardness and awkwardness. I should have stopped it right away. Should have gone up to him and said, Forget what you said about love in that garden in Calcutta. They were just words, it was a long time ago. We’ve been pulled through the eyes of many needles since.

  But I was afraid. What if he looked at me—those lacquer-black eyes you couldn’t see into? If he said, What makes you think … ?

  I am a fool and a coward. Once I thought in complete sentences and acted them out. But after Ramesh …