Sister of My Heart Read online

  “Pishi Ma,” I cry, my voice breaking with excitement, “you must tell me. I need to know. And nothing could ever make me hate you.”

  “I hope that’s true,” says Pishi, “because you and Anju are the daughters I was not lucky enough to give birth to. Through you the Bidhata Purush has allowed me to experience the blessing of mother love, and for that I always thank him. But it’s not myself I worry about, it’s you. And your relationship with—”

  Here Pishi breaks off, and in the silence that wells up around us I notice how her voice has changed, grown dark and deep-grained as it never was before. And in dizzy fear I know this is a dangerous story, one that can burn me in its sudden blaze.

  “Are you sure you really want to know this secret?”

  Pishi watches me. I know that if I betray the tiniest fear she will stop, the sun will cease its white-hot circling around me, and I will have my old, safe life back again.

  I hold my body tense against the temptation. “I am sure,” I say.

  “Very well,” says Pishi, and her breath is ragged and resigned. “Come, sit close to me, and I’ll tell you. It is your right after all, this story about your father. And your mother, yes, for it is her story too. And if your love survives this telling, then you’ll know it’s true, and that nothing can break it, ever.”

  That is how I finally learn about my father’s life, and his death.

  “Your father came to this house in the hot month of Sraban,” says Pishi, “in a parched year when the crops were beginning to fail and there were more beggars than usual in front of our gate. Even Bijoy, Anju’s father, had worry etched deep and black under his eyes because in those days much of our money came from our ancestral paddy fields. His anxiety hurt me, for more than anything in my life I wanted him to be happy, my younger brother who had taken me into his home when mine shattered and had never for a moment let me feel that I was a burden.

  “With him your father brought a locked blue trunk, a long, thin music case stitched in red silk, a newlywed wife, and rain. For the very night he came, the sky filled with fat-bellied clouds the color of steel, and a cool wind began to blow, smelling of faraway wet earth and champak flowers—a smell that even now, remembering, makes my old-widow blood beat faster. And the monsoons began. Lying in bed we could hear the jhup-jhup of the raindrops on the roof, the coconut trees rustling their pleasure. The rain lasted all month, just heavy enough, with sunshine in between to keep us from getting tired. By the end of it our garden was filled with more flowers than I recall ever seeing, bel and jui and the white king-flower, gandharaj, that makes you drunk with its sweet smell, and the crops were saved.

  “Perhaps that is why Bijoy took your father so fully into his heart, because he believed he was good luck. But I think he would have even otherwise. For your father was a man of great charm, and part of his charm lay in his recklessness, his belief that every day was a new one untouched by yesterday’s deeds, and that he could get away with anything for the price of a smile.

  “All this Bijoy loved because it was so completely different from the way he was, always proper, always responsible. The way he, as the only son of the Chatterjees, had been trained to be. But some of his seriousness fell away from him when he was with your father, and he laughed more boyishly, more openheartedly, than in years. For this, I too loved your father.

  “Your father told us his name was Gopal, and that he was the only son of our youngest uncle. All we knew of this uncle was that he had taken his share of the family inheritance and left home a long time ago, after a fierce quarrel with our grandfather. Now Gopal told us that his father had settled in the city of Khulna, across the border, where he had thrived as a merchant until the partition. But in the riots that followed he had lost everything—the business, the house, his savings—and, brokenhearted, died soon after. His last words to Gopal had been to go back to his ancestral home and tell his people his story.

  “We welcomed our lost cousin into the family with joy, honored that he had chosen to come to us. He was so handsome and fair-skinned, so obviously well born, and laughed so merrily when describing the trials of his travels to Calcutta. He would burst into song for the least reason. And he played the flute—for that was what had been in the red silken case—as sweetly as his namesake Gopal, the god Krishna, must have done when he charmed the milkmaids of Brindaban into leaving home and husband to follow him.

  “There was much that he didn’t tell us about himself and about your mother. Some of it I would learn from words Nalini let fall carelessly from time to time, and some I would learn when you were born, by piecing together her delirious words as she tossed about in her bed of fever and grief and childbirth pain. That he’d met his new bride as she washed clothes by the river at one of the villages where his boat had stopped. That he promised her riches and honor, marriage into one of the oldest Calcutta families, promised her eternal love in a voice so sweet she thought it surely would pull down the stars from the sky. It made her forget years’ worth of cautions impressed on her by mothers and aunts, the old women of the village. At dawn she slipped away from her parents’ home. She let your father take her hand and pull her onto the rickety boat filled with men like himself who hoped to make their fortune in the big city.

  I want to interrupt Pishi. Surely she is wrong. How can this runaway adventuress be my mother, who is built of sighs and complaints, who guards every propriety as though it is a fragile crystal heirloom she has been personally entrusted with? My mother, who has implied often enough that the laxities of our household would never have been tolerated in her father’s perfectly run one—how could she have been washing clothes like a common village girl? And yet, as the scene shapes itself inside my eyelids, I know it is true.

  In the scene, my mother is slim and scared. The hot stares of the men on the boat make her blush and draw the edge of her sari over her face. She wonders in fear as she breathes in their unwashed odors if she has made a horrible mistake, if distaste for the unending drudgery of her chores—scouring pots that blackened her nails and broke them, lighting coal fires that turned her eyes a stinging red, plastering cow dung on the walls of the hut that leaked every monsoon—has led her to ruin. She wipes at her tears silently as night falls and the sky fills with strange stars, and when my father tries to kiss her, discreetly, behind a bale of hay, she pushes him from her with sudden energy.

  Fortunately, my father is not without honor. When after changing many boats and trains they finally reach Calcutta, he takes her to the Kali temple. There a priest mumbles a few mantras and impatiently gestures at them to exchange garlands. Then he tucks into his waistband the coins my father gave him and turns to the next couple, for Kalighat is popular with lovers who have eloped. And thus my parents are married.

  It is not what my mother dreamed of all those years as she swept the mud floor of her home with a coconut-leaf jhata and ground red pepper paste for curries and wiped the snot noses of her younger brothers and sisters. Where is her red Benarasi, glittering with zari thread? Where is her wedding jewelry, the gold bangles with the alligator-head design, the thick seven-strand chain that when unwound will reach from her head to her feet? Where are the hooped earrings so large they knock against her cheeks when she turns her head, the tiny diamond that sets off her perfect nose? (For my mother is pretty, she knows this, pretty enough to deserve a better life.) Where are all her childhood friends, fellow-sharers in fantasy, to look on enviously and whisper behind their hands as the conch shell sounds its auspicious notes? Still, she allows herself a tiny smile as her husband rubs vermillion into the parting of her hair, the good luck sindur that proclaims to the world that she is a married woman, with a new life ahead of her.

  That new life must have seemed good to my mother as they approached the white mansion that shone in the late afternoon sun, its brick neatly painted, its marble polished, its wrought-iron gates topped regally with prancing lions. The driver honked impressively—for although they’d hired a wheeled cart to c
arry their baggage most of the way, when they were close to the house, her husband had hailed a taxi. It wouldn’t do to ride up to his cousin’s house as though they were penniless, he said. Indeed, if he hadn’t been set upon by robbers early in his trip, he would have hired a taxi all the way.

  Did my mother believe the story about the robbers? She had no option. To doubt him would have meant doubting herself, allowing that insidious voice to start up again inside the spaces of her skull, you shouldn’t have, you shouldn’t have. So she chose not to hear the stridency in my father’s voice as he told the gatekeeper to announce his arrival to barababu, the master of the house. Yes, I’m his cousin brother, that’s right, from Khulna, what’s the matter, something wrong with your ears? And when the barababu did appear, looking a trifle puzzled, she tried not to see the strained lines at the corners of her husband’s mouth as he smiled, and how he held himself, too careful of the creases of his dhoti, as though he had something to prove. It pained her that she could see all this about her husband already, and she no more than a day-old bride. Somehow it made the pain worse to see that the barababu, a true gentleman—you could tell it by the way he never raised his voice, never had to, in his life—believed every word her husband was saying. So she was glad when the widow, the barababu’s sister, took her by the hand and said, Come along, my dear, you must be so tired after the long journey, not to mention terrified, having those robbers attack you like that. (For that was what Gopal had said, to explain his bride’s bare arms, her unjeweled neck and ears. And my mother, lowering her startled eyes quickly, guiltfully, had realized that it was not the ceremonial knotting of garments that binds a wife to a husband but the chain of collusion.) Fortunately, the widow did not notice my mother’s blush of shame. What is the world coming to these days, she continued. It is kaliyug for sure. Come, let the men catch up on their man-talk. I’ll get you a glass of sweet michri water and show you the room where you are to sleep.

  “Oh, she was beautiful, your mother,” says Pishi. “Maybe the most beautiful woman I’d seen, though recently it seems to me that you’ve surpassed her. Even on that day, with the dust of Calcutta lying like a veil over her face, and wilted like a lotus flower plucked and left too long in the sun, she could turn a man’s head. Yet how docile she seemed as she followed me, docile and a little stunned. How full of young wonder when I showed her to her room and explained how the switch to the ceiling fan worked, and the flush toilet. But that was to change soon.”

  I imagine the years passing my mother by as she sits on the high four-poster bed, staring out through the window grills at the passing vendors calling their wares outside her room. But it is not really her room, just as the peacock-silk bedspread is not hers, nor the saris she wears, or the jewelry. She cannot even claim the food she eats as rightfully hers, earned by her own husband. She is here on charity, a poor cousin by marriage, and even though the barababu and his wife are truly kind and welcoming, even though the widow-lady, his sister, takes her everywhere she goes—the market, the temple, the jatra performances of tales from the Mahabharat—the truth of her situation gnaws at her endlessly. She feels cheated, and as each year rolls like karma’s iron wheel toward its end, the lines of discontent take over her face like spiderwebs do an abandoned house. She begins to nag at her husband more and more. Are you ever going to make any money, when are we going to move into our own home, where are all your fine promises now, hai Mother Kali, this is my punishment for following this man, for smearing black on my ancestors’ faces.

  “Your father was a dear man,” says Pishi, “but not lucky in matters of money. It was as though the Bidhata Purush, having given him good looks and charm enough for two, felt he had received his due. Oh, he had great ideas, Gopal, but they were like unbaked clay pots. You went to fetch water, lowered them into the lake, and all you were left with was mud on your hands. That’s how it was with the handmade perfume factory he proposed, the radical newspaper he wanted to run. He would go to Bijoy for the capital, promising big things. This time it’ll work, I know it, Biju Da, I’ll return you double money within two months. Bijoy was always happy to help. He was a generous man, my brother. Too generous sometimes, we told him, your Gouri Ma and I, but he wouldn’t listen. He just said, ‘What’s the good of money, Didi, if I can’t use it to make my own brother’—that’s how he thought of your father—‘happy. By God’s grace, don’t we have enough?’

  “ ‘Not really,’ Gouri would say. ‘Have you seen the accounts this month?’ Even in those days she was the clear-eyed one, fooled by little. She would point out how the bookstore was running at a loss, and how Harihar the nayeb hadn’t sent the full revenues from the village, claiming that the paddy prices had fallen again. ‘You’ve got to go and check on him,’ she said. ‘He’s stealing from us with both hands.’

  “But Bijoy would just smile his gentle smile and say, ‘Gouri, where’s your trust? Hari Kaku has been with our family for thirty years. He used to carry me around on his shoulders when I visited the village as a little boy. He would never do a thing like that.’

  “ ‘If he’s so honest,’ Gouri would say, her face reddening, for she hated that anyone should take advantage of her husband’s generous heart, ‘he shouldn’t mind you asking a question or two, checking his facts and figures with other people.’

  “Bijoy would shake his head. ‘I can’t go snooping around for the sake of a few rupees, Gouri,’ he’d say. ‘It would be an insult to Hari Kaku. We Chatterjees have never done things like that.’ His voice would still be soft, but firm also, and final, so that your mother knew there was nothing to be gained by arguing. In any case, she believed that a woman’s first duty was to support her husband.

  “She was the perfect wife, your aunt Gouri, and her perfection was beautiful because it sprang from a source of goodness deep in her heart. I admired her greatly for it, and envied her a little too. But later I would wish it had not been that way. If she had fought with Bijoy, if she had wept and sulked and threatened and charmed, like ordinary women do with the men they love, perhaps he would still be alive.

  “Deep within himself Bijoy must have known Gouri was right, that the fortunes of the Chatterjee family were like a moon spinning toward eclipse. I think that is why he agreed with your father about the ruby cave.

  “But first came the pregnancies.

  “We were all pleased when Gouri and Nalini became pregnant within weeks of each other, but Bijoy was overjoyed. He had been wishing for a child ever since he was married, seven years ago, and he took the double pregnancy as a miracle of sorts, further proof of the good luck Gopal brought to the house. He showered the two women with gifts—of equal value, that’s the kind of man he was—and made sure the baidya came each month to check on their progress. Special food was prepared for them, whatever their hearts desired. When your mother, who had not been doing too well, took a fancy for mangoes in the winter, Bijoy sent all the way to Hogg’s market, where the sahebs shopped, to get a dozen of them at an exorbitant price. He wanted her to be happy.”

  But my mother was not happy, and she no longer attempted, as she had done early in her marriage, to hide it. Nor did she care that an unhappy mother is said to pass on her sorrow to the baby in her womb. For with the onset of her pregnancy, a strange desperation had come over her. As her waist thickened and her feet grew swollen, as her only treasure, her beauty, disappeared within the bloated sack she saw her body turning into, she felt that her one chance at life was over. Things would only get worse now. She was doomed to grow old and die in the borrowed room she had lived in for the last three years. And thus her tirades grew worse. Are you a man or a ground-crawling insect? she would shout at my father. How long are you going to beg your daily food from your cousin-brother, just because he is kind? Running after no-good schemes like a dog chasing his shadow. Why can’t you get a job in an office like all the other men? Chee chee, don’t you see how even the servants look at us, with no respect in their eyes, how they whisper about us in th
e kitchens? And finally, If the baby knew what kind of father he had, he too would be ashamed. He would rather die than be born to you.

  For a while my father would have tried to ignore her. She didn’t really mean it. Everyone knew how pregnant women were. Water spouted from their eyes for no reason, and flame from their tongues. He would sit on the terrace after dinner and play on his flute while Bijoy listened, and the darkness would be cool against his skin, cool and calm and deep, the water of a black lake that extended out forever, and the high notes of the flute would be perfect ripples on its satin surface.

  But the part about the baby—ah, that stung, as though someone had wound him around and around in poisonous bichuti vines. So that one morning he left, very early, before even the servants were awake, and was gone for three days. And just when a frantic Bijoy was about to inform the inspector saheb at the police station that his brother was missing, he returned. With the ruby.

  “The sun was setting when he flung open the gate and hurried up the gravel driveway,” says Pishi, “and its last rays caught his disheveled hair in a brown halo. A two-day stubble covered his face, and his clothes—the same he had worn when he left the house—were crumpled and muddy. But his eyes—they glittered in his face with such intensity—like he was a prophet, or maybe a madman. He was laughing as he shouted for us all to come and see what he had with him.”

  Rolled across his palm the ruby must have sparkled like fire and ice together, like a teardrop wept by Jatayu, the mythical dragon-bird. It was so large that all who saw it drew in their breath in sharp amazement, and even my mother was silent while he told the household about the cave.

  “He’d met a man, said Gopal, though he would not tell us where or how or his name either, a man who knew of a cave deep in the jungles of Sundarban where a million rubies such as these grew from the walls. His great-grandfather had been told of the cave by a sannyasi he’d met while on pilgrimage. He had found the place and chiseled three stones from it, and on his return had them polished by the finest jewelers in Calcutta. Yes, this stone that we were passing around in amazed silence was one of them.