The Vine of Desire: A Novel Read online

  Now it’s too late. All I can do is avoid him also.

  “Oh, you!” says Anju. When she speaks to me, her voice is indulgent, like molasses. But to Sunil, she is all polite business, not like a wife should be. Even I, newly arrived, have noted this. “Still believing in magic, like falling stars and sea horses to wish on? Next you’ll be reading the lines on our foreheads and telling us our fortunes!”

  The ocean is a sudden glare, the sun angled hard on waves made of metal. “I’m not sure I’d want to, even if I knew how,” I say. My toes dig a hole in the sand. The air is sour with seaweed. “Sometimes the only way we can bear our lives is because we don’t know what’s coming up.”

  Anju stares unblinking at the metal-plated sea, her mouth hard with wanting to argue. She’s remembering my helpless, hurried flight. The handful of rupees, the paltry trinkets stuffed into a handbag. The memory is a hot, vomity feeling in both our throats. Is it love that makes us this permeable to each other’s pain?

  I know what Anju wants to say. Seeing into the future would help us prepare for it. The possibility of arranging one’s life—she’s always liked to believe in it. But even she knows better. What of her miscarriage, that sense of being cracked open and scooped out? What could she have ever planned against it?

  “Enough of pasts and futures!” I make my voice gay, decisive. (It is important to have a gay, decisive voice, particularly when one has nothing else.) “It’s a beautiful day, the most beautiful I’ve seen in America. Let’s enjoy it!” I spread a flowered plastic sheet on the sand, open the picnic basket. I start lifting out packets wrapped in foil, and after a moment Anju joins me.

  I have not exaggerated. It’s the kind of day that turns the seal rocks offshore into wet gold. The Golden Gate Bridge seems close enough for us to pluck its harp string–slender wires. Impossible clarity, after so much clouding.

  Ever since Dayita and I arrived, it’s been raining. Two weeks of continuous chill rain. The creeks bloated with it—I saw them on TV—the hillsides beginning their black, gashed sliding. Drunken, tilted houses. Close-ups of stunned families who had to leave with nothing. I saw the others, too, the victims of the earthquake, so many people crowded onto the floors of makeshift shelters, the children crying for things they’d never see again. Freeways buckled and cracked like discarded snake-skin, entire streets gutted by fire. I felt a strange responsibility. The trains weren’t running on time, so Sunil had to take the car. We were imprisoned in the apartment. The air was sticky and stale. Inescapable. Dayita fretted all day. After a week, the sound of rain takes on a relentlessness. It dredges up memories fetid as corpses. I had to press my face against the fogged-up window to keep in things it does no good to speak about. Nothing outside but concrete and a balding tree with dispirited needles for leaves.

  “Do you miss India?” Anju asked disappointedly.

  I couldn’t lie. I said, “How do people here watch the stars?”

  “From windows, I guess,” said Anju, who was never much of a star-watcher.

  “What’s the name of that tree?”

  “I’m not sure—some kind of pine, I would think.” She gave my shoulder an apologetic squeeze. “Listen, how about we go camping when summer comes around?”

  The evenings, after Sunil returned, were the worst. Each atom of air tense, resisting inhalation. The walls loomed inward, swollen with claustrophobia. Guarded greetings all around. Only Dayita shrieked her baby-pleasure, holding up her arms to be picked up. I kept busy in the kitchen until it was time to eat. Dinner would be full of fractured words, Anju talking too much, trying to pretend everything was fine. I needed all my energies just to swallow. Dayita played by Sunil’s feet. He watched her with the intense eyes of a motorist on a sleety night. The way he focuses on the shining reflectors that divide the lanes. The way he knows that to stray might mean destruction. As soon as I could, I would take Dayita into my room, prolong the nursing. I would hear them, of course, Anju and Sunil. Halted, formal sentences, mostly about Dayita. In a few minutes, silence. There’s no silence like married silence, its undertow of reproach. When I brought Dayita back, they reached for her with panicked fingers, as though they’d been drowning.

  The family (can I call us that?) has finished its picnic lunch. Crisp parotas stuffed with spicy potatoes, a bowl of emerald coriander chutney. (In this one way, at least, I am helpful.) He lies back, a newspaper protecting his face. From the sun, from us. Dayita has fallen asleep, her head wedged into his armpit. His body looks relaxed, almost happy.

  We speak softly, so we will not disturb them. It is a conversation I’ve been starting all week.

  “You’ve got to go back to college, Anju,” I say. “You’re well enough now. Didn’t you tell me that the new classes are starting in a few days?”

  “I don’t think I’m ready,” Anju says. Caught in her mouth, the words are mutinous pebbles. Anju, who never stuttered as a child. I don’t blame her. You drop your life and watch it roll away, growing like a monstrous ball of mud. It seems impossible that you’ll ever run fast enough to catch it again.

  If I show sympathy, our talk will end as it always does, in tears. So I say, “You’re as ready as you’ll ever be. At least while I’m here you won’t have to worry about the cooking and cleaning—”

  Anju cuts me off, her face furious and knotted. “I didn’t invite you here to be a maid in my house. And, anyway, you’re going to be here a long time.”

  She hates it when I speak of returning to India. But can’t she see that I must? Can’t she see the way we’re living now—a giant hand squeezing us together, something getting ready to burst?

  “Silly girl!” I say. “I love taking care of people, you know that. And don’t worry about college—you’ll do beautifully. You always did before.”

  “I’ll go to college if you promise to go, too,” says Anju.

  The air is a black sphere around me, impossible to breathe. No, it’s a vast whiteness that wants me to lose myself in it. Anju’s words gleam intermittently through it. Dangerous, unthinkable spangles. “You’ve got to stand on your feet, take care of Dayita—”

  She doesn’t understand. There’s too much of the past in my blood still, like a sickness I have to sweat out before I can take on the future.

  Sunil sits up so suddenly, it’s clear he hasn’t been asleep at all. Dayita, jerked awake, begins to wail. “It’s getting cold.” His words are scissors. Snip, snap. “Time to head back.”

  Some time soon, tonight or tomorrow, in bed, they’re going to have a conversation. There will be frowns, tears, defiance, accusation. All very softly, because the walls are thin. Because the fictions of courtesy are still important to us.

  This is how it will go.

  He: She’s here on a visitor’s visa. She can’t go to school.

  She: She can change her visa—people do, all the time.

  He: She’s got to go back in six months. That was the deal.

  She: Who made that deal? Not me.

  He: She can’t keep staying with us.

  She: Why not?

  He: (Silence)

  She: Very well. I’ll find her a room. She’ll be able to get a student job, and then, once she gets her degree—

  He: Let her go back to India, Anju. We’ve got our life, she’s got hers. You can help her from here, if you like. Send her money.

  She: (Silence)

  He: Can’t you understand?

  She: How can you talk about money, like she’s a beggar? She’s my sister, my best friend. I need her here. Can’t you understand?

  He: (Silence)

  She: (Silence)

  He: (Silence)

  She: (Silence)

  Two turned backs, like escarpments. Anger runs from one to the other, a mouse on scrabbled feet, gnawing. In my frozen bed Dayita whimpers, rubbing her feverish eyes.

  None of us will sleep this night.

  The sun teeters over the ocean like an overripe orange, ready to burst. The road we’ve taken this
time curves by the rippled dunes. It seems like the edge of the world. There are long rushes, like old women’s hair. But I gaze upward, always more interested in the things of the sky. Above me, bright particles, hovering. They look like kites flown by giants. I clutch Anju’s arm and point.

  Huge and wheeling over the bay. Every possible color. But where are the cords? It takes me a moment to see the people dangling from them.

  “They must be hang gliders!” Anju leans out of the window in her excitement, shielding her eyes. “I read something about them in California Living—they like to take off from the cliffs around here because of the strong offshore winds.”

  One of the gliders is arcing back toward land. I admire the ambidextrous dip and lift of his wing spans. Their wide abandonment. Like being in love. I haven’t felt this way in a long time.

  I grip the seat and speak to the back of his head, forgetting to be careful. “Can we please see where they land? Can you find it?” My voice vibrates like a tuning fork. Even Anju stares, surprised. He swivels his head for a long, risky glance at me, takes the next exit. I shouldn’t have asked. I shouldn’t have. In the driver’s mirror, a small pulse beats in his temple.

  I am afraid of that erratic beating. But I will wait until later to be sorry. Right now there’s a spirit wind, wild and snatching. I open my fisted hands to it, feel it fly across my palms, rearranging lines. Sunil has wrapped Dayita in his coat. We walk across the parking lot—just a dirt strip on a cliffside. A platform of sorts where one can stand. Then the gliders are all around our heads, coming in to evening. Enormous winged creatures, helmeted and goggled, something other than human. But delicate and fervent, too. Are such things possible? To be so free of gravity, so deliciously loosened from earth?

  “I’d like to be up there,” Anju says. She bends so far over the railing that I grow afraid and grasp her sari. There are purple shadows around her, aureoles of yearning. “It must be special, to feel the wind going right through you. All your problems slipping away—only you and the sky and the waves so far below they look painted. To maybe keep going into the light …” She leaves the sentence unfinished, languid with possibility.

  Sunil puts out his free hand. His fingers are lean and polished as the copper the jewelers back home beat into bracelets. They encircle her elbow entirely, she’s lost so much weight. “Now you’ve seen them, let’s go home.”

  “Wait,” said Anju, pointing. Two of the gliders are landing next to the platform. The men’s legs bracing against the ground, puffs of dust, gravelly scrape of shoes. The current from their wings pulls at my hair. Someone rushes up to unharness them, but they’re shrugging off their gear already, laughing, raising their arms high to clap hands with each other, pulling off helmets to let their hair—black, agile red—tumble out over their shoulders.

  “Why, they’re women,” I cry. “Kingfisher women!”

  Sunil and Anju look at me. “Kingfisher women?” asks Anju, raising her eyebrows at the bright yellow of their outfits.

  I nod.

  Once long ago, I’d seen them. Near a gorge. We were standing on a bridge. It was early morning, filigreed with fog. The birds were blue-backed and shining. Slim-beaked. They came out of nowhere, plunging down, soaring up, chasing each other, diving to the river for food. It seemed to me they sang. And kissed in the air. They weren’t afraid of anything. Even when the train thundered by, they kept doing what they loved.

  “Is this real, or is it a tale like the ones you used to make up when we were girls?” Anju asks. “Because I don’t remember any such bridge—or any such birds.”

  I realize that I’ve been speaking aloud. I hadn’t meant to. “You weren’t there,” I say reluctantly.

  I don’t want to say any more. But they’re waiting.

  “I was with Ramesh,” I say. It is the first time I’ve spoken his name since I came to America. Heat stings my cheeks. I wait for my voice to tell me how I feel. Is it sticky with bitterness? Black with tar? No, it is cool, matter-of-fact. It tells me nothing. “It was the only time we’d gone somewhere without my mother-in-law. He’d taken me to the inauguration of a bridge he’d built. He was good at things like that. The workmen loved him because he was kind and fair and gave them all bonuses.”

  This part I don’t say: He had stood close and put his arm around me. He asked if I were cold, would I like him to get the shawl out of the boot of the car. The birds had been flashes of blue fire. I asked him if they were kingfishers, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe they were creatures from another world. I told him I longed to be like them, bright and brave. He said, We can be like them, Sudha. We can. Why not? He believed it—I saw it on his flushed, earnest mouth. I almost loved him then. But later, when his mother decided to erase our daughter from my womb as though she were a misspelled word, he didn’t have the strength.

  Sunil spits out an unfamiliar American invective and swings away—as though he can read my thoughts. His shoulders are high and stiff. He pulls the collar of his coat over Dayita’s head, hiding her from my past.

  “Forget him!” says Anju. Her hand fits tightly over mine, that old protective gesture from our childhood days. “You did the right thing. That’s all that matters. A lot of women in your position would have given in. You left. You didn’t care that you had to give up everything….”

  She doesn’t know the one hundred and one faces of my cowardice. My resentment. Someday I will tell her, I did care. All the things I had to leave behind, not only clothes and jewelry but my good name. The legitimacy of wifehood that I had worked so hard to earn. But now the women fliers are walking by us. They call out cheery hellos. They are not young, I note, surprised. There’s a grainy strength about them, like desert rock. Their skin is wind-rasped and bright with living. Their waists are wide and sturdy.

  “What lovely saris,” the redheaded one calls out.

  Unexpectedly, Anju holds out her hand. It trembles a little—such overtures are hard for her nowadays—the fingers curling inward in their reluctance. Her nails are soft as wax, and very white. I see with dismay that her lifeline has acquired a new, feathery thinness. The woman takes Anju’s hand in both of hers.

  “You were beautiful,” Anju says.

  The woman smiles. There is henna in her hair, I can smell its wild, weedy fragrance. “Thank you. Would you like to try it sometimes? It’s not as hard as it looks—I teach people. If you want, I can give you a lesson. We can go up together, on a tandem glider—”

  “We really must go now,” says Sunil. He looks at the woman with disapproval. He is suspicious of unrequired adventures. They are American in the worst possible way. Unwomanly. He gives Anju’s elbow a small, proprietary tug. “Dayita’s bound to catch a cold in all this wind.”

  “Do you have a card?” asks Anju. The woman nods and unzips a pocket, hands Anju a rainbow-colored rectangle. Her companion has joined us and drapes a casual hand around her waist. Weeks later, just before I fall asleep, it will strike me with a slight sense of shock that they are lovers.

  As we walk to the car, I can feel their eyes on us, considering. Are they wondering about our little ménage, who belongs to whom? Perhaps they think all Indians live this way, the man walking in front, hunched and shivering against the wind. The child staring gravely over his shoulder. The two women stumbling a little in their wind-whipped saris.

  No one speaks on the way home. Rain clouds glower through the rear window. We are tired and cranky. We’ve seen the amazing, the primeval human dream made real: people with wings. And it hasn’t changed our lives.

  Once in India I scrubbed the color of marriage from my forehead, believing I was rid of it. But it comes back. Some mornings, my pillow seems faintly powdered with red. In my lap Dayita is making puckered, sucking sounds, dreaming of milk. I try to think of objects—that’s the safest. A slice of Langra mango, flame-sweet. A cool shower after a sticky Calcutta day, the separate, silver threads of water flicking my grateful skin. Currents of air which travel the earth, circling, ris
ing, somersaulting back. Holding up cobalt wings against a cobalt sky.

  Three

  Sunil

  Come here, kid. Let me put my arms around you and my face against your chest. Delicate bird bones, your laughter like feathers. All day I’ve been waiting for this.

  I can hear your heart going like a runaway engine. When Anju was pregnant, I once asked the doctor, why do kids’ hearts do that? He gave me a very scientific answer, but I’ve forgotten it.

  So I’m just going to believe it’s because you’re happy to see me.

  Sit on my lap so I can see your eyes, so much like your mother’s.

  Forget I said that.

  Sometimes I feel I’m drowning—but not while I hold you.

  They say infants’ eyes look so wise because they still remember things from their past lives. If you could speak, I’d ask you what you remember. I’d ask you, Is it true, what they say about destiny being inescapable?

  If you said yes, it would give me permission.

  Kid, I’m so tired—and my struggle has just started.

  Enough of my troubles. It’s time for a story.

  Imagine pigeons—flocks and flocks of them, turning the screen white—yes, this is another movie I’m telling you about. I love movies, don’t you? So flat and rectangular, life simplified and contained, or at least made bearable.

  Imagine an angry man whose trained pigeon is taken by another. Imagine a quarrel, insults, old incidents brought up, honor needing to be avenged. Does this sound like a different time? A different country? Or are you thinking that here, too, people are the same?

  As I was saying, it was necessary to take revenge. So one of the men stole the other’s daughter and took her to a city far away to sell. They locked her in a dark room. There was another girl there, also kidnapped. The two wept together. Having lost their families, they thought of each other as sisters.