The Vine of Desire: A Novel Read online

  Are you wondering why I’m telling you a story about two sisters?

  I’m not sure myself.

  Perhaps as I tell it, I’ll figure it out.

  The imprisoned girls—they were maybe twelve years of age—were quite docile. They ate what the woman in charge gave them. They went with her when she called. This made your Anju Aunty angry. She wanted them to slap away the hand that brought them food. She wanted them to bite and scratch. I said, But how could they? All their life they’d been trained to obey without question. Plus, they knew they’d be beaten if they fought back. Anju’s chest rose and fell with emotion. She said, I can still want, can’t I?

  That’s how she used to be, passionate about all kinds of things, even those that had nothing to do with her life.

  When I watched a movie with Anju, even a movie which I’d seen before, it changed. She forced me to see things I didn’t notice. Sometimes that was good, but mostly it ruined the movie, bringing in questions that no one intended you to have.

  But all this is ancient history. We no longer watch movies together.

  Enter a buyer. Her mistress needs a serving girl. She can’t decide between the two kidnapped girls—then she chooses the other one because her mistress wants a light-skinned maid around her. And our girl, the pigeon flier’s daughter, is sold to a high-class brothel.

  There are a lot of brothels in movies. Anju says it’s because of male fantasies.

  They change her name, she becomes a famous singer, known all over Lucknow. She’s desired by many men. Her name? I’ve forgotten it. What does a name matter, anyway? It’s the concept that’s important. She’s the singer-girl whom everyone wants to sleep with but no one wants to marry, just as I’m the husband who lacks husbandliness and you’re the child who escaped death. Though, depending on who’s watching, I could be the man who’s lost his voice and you the child who finds it for him.

  The singer falls in love with a rich young nabab, but though he, too, loves her, he must obey his dying mother and marry the woman she chooses. Heartbroken, the singer goes away with another man, although she doesn’t love him. But nothing works out and finally she finds herself back in the brothel.

  Then one day she is invited to sing at a feast at someone’s house and comes across the girl who was her prisonmate long ago, remember, the one who became a serving girl? She was married to her employer’s son, and now she’s the mistress of this household, with a handsome son. The two friends laugh and weep as they speak of their fates—how easily their positions might have been reversed. And then the husband returns from his journey—and guess what! That’s right, he’s the nabab the singer loved. From his eyes she can see he’s still attracted to her.

  Oh, these movies, Anju said when she saw this part. They’re full of the wildest coincidences.

  But is the real world that different? Who knows how many lovers are separated by the wills of others, or circumstance, or their own misunderstanding of duty? How many lives are ruined by chance? It’s just that when it happens to you, you don’t tell anyone. There’s too much pain in it.

  I didn’t say that to Anju, though. She might have asked, How do you know so much about it, Mr. Experience?

  Besides, my years with my father had trained me to keep my thoughts to myself, and I couldn’t break that conditioning, no more than the kidnapped girls could break theirs.

  (Even with you, I swallow down the things that crowd my mouth, begging to be heard. How tonight, serving spinach dal, your mother curved her fingers around the ladle. Her slim, bare wrist, at once strong and fragile. Her unpainted, glowing nails. I followed the silvery straightness of her arm up, up, until it disappeared into her blouse. Her elbow was dimpled and cool. A longing to touch it shook me so hard, I thought I wouldn’t be able to stop. I had to get up and leave the table. What’s wrong? Anju said. Your mother said nothing. I think she knew.)

  What are we training you for, kid, without realizing it? What conditionings will stop you like those invisible electric fences suburban home-owners use to keep their dogs from running off?

  The singer acts honorably. She leaves, the family stays intact, and her friend never knows that her husband had been the singer’s lover.

  Do you think she did the right thing? I asked Anju afterward. What would you have done?

  Anju made a face. I would have made sure I didn’t get into such a mess, she said.

  After she went to bed, I turned on the computer. I was supposed to be testing a new software program. But instead I stared at the screen, thinking about questions of honor. How many unhappinesses they lead us into. Who can even say what honor is? Isn’t it right for us to pursue happiness? Isn’t that our first right?

  I’d fallen into the same error as Anju, asking questions the movie never meant to answer.

  The singer is back in her room, looking into a mirror, wiping dust from it. What does she see in her mirror-self? She half-turns, as though to tell us. But before she can speak, the movie ends.

  I like that idea, don’t you? Scary and magical, all at once. A mirror-self to show me who I really am.

  But if I find one, will I have the courage to look?

  Sorry, kiddo. I got carried away with the story. I’ve kept you up too late. Sleep now. I’ll rub your back the way you like, little circles with my knuckles, as I walk up and down, carrying you on my chest.

  Four

  Waiting by the side of the road for the bus that is to take her to college, Anju clutches her book bag to her chest. She is dressed, as always, in blue jeans and a too-large sweatshirt, and though it is a cloudy day on the brink of spilling over into rain, she wears her dark glasses. She had gone into Wal-Mart with Sudha the day before classes began and bought the largest, most opaque pair she could find. Behind them, she feels anonymous, invisible, almost safe.

  It is the year of death, the year of discovery. (Is it a rule that one must precede the other?) In Sarajevo, Johannesburg, Burundi, the ground is sludgy with blood. Christians and Muslims, Zulus and the ANC, Hutu and Tutsi. In Ethiopia scientists have unearthed the skull of humankind’s earliest ancestor. In the U.S. scientists are about to capture the elusive top quark, the missing link of the atom.

  School started two weeks ago, but Anju still wakes with an ache in her stomach, a tightness like a watch spring that’s been wound too far. She wakes long before she needs to and lies in bed, watching the first light apply itself to the walls. It is a delicate gray, with a rhythm to it like waves on a windless day, or her own breath. She closes her eyes to learn its nature. Inhalation, exhalation, the faint antiseptic odor of Listerine mouth-wash. She remembers a line she had read in childhood, she has forgotten where. Every breath we take is another step toward our deaths. When she opens her eyes, she sees that Sunil is watching her. He smiles and reaches over to kiss her cheek. His lips are smooth as waxed fruit. The light has grown hard, like diamonds. Each time this startles her as though it were something new.

  On the bus, Anju chooses her seat carefully, counting off the rows until she is at the center of the vehicle. She prefers a seat with no other occupant. Aisles only. The window seat makes her dizzy, all that cityscape rushing past her: glassy office buildings which glint too brightly, freeways which arch their bron-tosaurian necks over each other. The strip malls hunker down in the middle of asphalt expanses, alien as stalled spaceships. From the corners of gas stations, signs shaped like eyeballs on stalks follow her with their unwinking stare.

  There is a newspaper left on the seat next to her, sprawled open to a page that states that Steven Spielberg has won his first Oscars for Schindler’s List. Anju considers it for a moment, reading the words and the gaps between them. She has heard her classmates (but that word is too intimate) discussing the movie. Would her rescue of Sudha, minute in scale as it is, qualify as a Schindlerism? Or is it Sudha who is saving her?

  She pulls a textbook out of her bag, smooths down the red and black cover. In one of her classes they are studying letters and diaries. The i
nstructor, an enthusiastic young woman who makes Anju feel old and slow, clasps her hands together as she explains why these genres have historically been so popular with women. She enunciates names. Dorothy Wordsworth, Fanny Burney, Sarah Kemble Knight. So much talent with nowhere to go except pages which only a single reader might see—or no one at all. The instructor thinks of it as a great pity.

  Imagine all the letters that were lost, she said last week. All the diaries that were thrown away unread. What a waste. Her voice was passionate, granuled with powdered glass. Sitting in the back of the class, Anju understood what she was saying. And yet—what freedom it must have been! What exquisite loneliness. Angling words across a sheet to reach one faraway mind. Blotting a page created only for yourself, as much truth as you dared to face.

  The bus brakes. The doors whoosh open. Stumbling out behind the other students into air that smells exhausted, Anju decides she, too, will write a letter. She will write a letter to her dead father.

  When the apartment door closes behind Anju, Sudha leans against it and shuts her eyes. Eight in the morning and she is tired already. The effort of staying out of Sunil’s way until he leaves for the office, the effort of getting Anju ready after that, in the little time that is left. Most days Anju won’t even get out of bed until Sudha pulls her from it. After her shower she will stand in the bathroom, a wet towel wrapped around her, until Sudha threatens to come in and dress her the way she does Dayita. She will push around cornflakes until they grow limp in her bowl. She will let the wet mop of her hair drip onto her shirt.

  “Really, Anju,” Sudha says in an exasperated voice as she towels it dry, as she combs out Anju’s tangles. “The amount of fuss you make to go to college! It’s like you’re five years old. I don’t know why you bother. You know I won’t let you miss class and stay home.”

  “Yes, Mom!” says Anju as she picks up her backpack and dons her dark glasses. She tries a jokey smile, but abandons it in midformation. Nausea coils in her throat like smoke. Only when she focuses her thoughts on four o’clock does she feel better. She’ll rush home as soon as she’s done with classes, and Sudha will have a snack waiting, a khichuri made with rice and mung dal, a childhood favorite of them both, with a wedge of fresh lemon on the side. Afterward they’ll curl up on the bed and talk, with Dayita asleep between them, until it’s time for Anju to work on assignments and for Sudha to start dinner. No. Today they’ll walk to the mall instead and wander around. They do this often, pretending to be aimless and extravagant, just like the other shoppers. But they have a secret agenda. “Take notes,” Anju hisses at Sudha. “This is the heart of America.”

  “Go, Anju,” says Sudha, giving her a not-ungentle push between the shoulder blades, and Anju goes.

  Left alone, Sudha leans against the door, her eyes squeezed shut. She stands this way until Dayita crawls to her and tugs at her sari. Then she picks her up. Against her chest she whispers, “Oh Dayita, now we’re in America—but what shall we do now?”

  Afternoon. Sunil finds he cannot concentrate on the report the secretary has typed up for him to review. The figures make no sense, and the words—customer interface, product development, new virus alert—have grown foreign, surreal. Gusts of talk and laughter flit over the cubicle wall and settle on his hair like ash. He runs his hand over the surface of his immaculately organized desk, but it gives him no pleasure. The message button on his phone blinks redly at him like a Cyclop’s eye. There are consultants he must contact, programmers he must supervise, unhappy customers he must appease. His boss is waiting for an update on a project he is spearheading, an important project that could generate significant revenues and lead to a promotion, a move out of this cubicle into a real office with a solid oak door people would have to knock on if they wanted to talk to him. He turns to his computer and lays his fingers on the slight, concave coolness of the keys, familiar as a lover’s dimple. But his tie feels as if it’s tied too tight. He puts his hand to his throat to loosen it, then realizes he didn’t wear one this morning. He walks to the window and cranks it open. There’s a wind outside, a restless, rogue wind that slips in and shuffles through the report on his desk. Sheets rustle to the floor, but Sunil does not turn to look. He watches the gray sky as though for a sign. Is it at all like the sky under which he ran barefoot as a boy, yelling behind a cut-away kite? He must have done so. Don’t all boys? But it is hard to find a trace of it—that sky or that boyhood—in his face.

  His face which he has schooled into pleasantness, so that the secretaries—especially the older ones, touching up their lipstick or patting their hair into place in the rest room—often say, That nice Mr. Majumdar. But today, alone in his cubicle, his face is as uncertain as a sky over which storm clouds are passing. Will there be a hurricane? His eyes flit like evening moths that sense a flame nearby.

  He takes a deep breath, pulls that maverick wind into his lungs. He moves away from the window and checks his watch. Two P.M. Is he thinking that it’ll be at least a couple of hours before Anju gets back from school? Two dangerous hours that make his heart speed up when he thinks of what might be done with them. There is a recklessness in the arc of his arm as he sweeps his coat from its rack. He leaves the floor littered with pages from the unread report and stops only to tell the secretary that he has to go home.

  All day Sudha works the way a deep-sea swimmer treads water, as though to stop were to drown. She cooks and vacuums and mops, she dusts the meager knickknacks in the living room. “Who would think that before I came to America I had never mopped a floor!” she says to Dayita, whom she keeps close by. “That girl’s into everything!” she’ll tell Anju later. “Can’t let her out of my sight a minute!” Does Anju sense that Sudha is afraid of: aloneness? When Dayita falls asleep, Sudha talks to herself.

  She camouflages her daily cleaning by leaving a few newspapers scattered around. This is so that Anju will not scold her. (“Did I bring you here to turn you into a servant? I swear I’ll stop going to college if all you do when I’m gone is clean, clean, clean.”) She feeds Dayita and eats a little of the khichuri she has cooked for Anju. “It feels funny eating all by myself,” she grumbles. “Civilized humans weren’t meant to live like this, don’t you think?” She places a clove into her mouth and chews on it abstractedly. It is an old habit that has stayed with her from girlhood.

  “Oh, Sudha, don’t tell me you still chew cloves like your mother made us do when we were children!” Anju exclaimed, laughing, after dinner on the first night. “Remember what she used to say—Girls, it will give you sweeter mouths—and a husband always likes a wife with a sweet mouth!” Then she clapped her hand over her mouth.

  Sudha smiled, though a bit ruefully. “It’s okay, Anju! Just because I’m divorced now doesn’t mean you can’t mention anything to do with marriage. Why then, we’ll never be able to speak of our growing-up days—because that’s what they were, a giant, nonending rehearsal for becoming married women!” Then she added, “Remember how I used to tell you that once I was married and out of Mother’s control, I’d never touch another clove? But when that day came, I found I couldn’t do without them.”

  “How we grow addicted to our tortures!” Anju said.

  Sunil shot her a glance. Perhaps he wondered if there was a second meaning to her words. He should have known, by now, that Anju wasn’t one to hide her meanings. She pointed her words toward people like arrows—that was the only way she knew to use them.

  Now, dutifully, Sudha turns on the TV. Anju has told her she must, it will help her understand Americans. So she watches a weather report that states there’s a 70 percent chance of rain; a commercial for paper towels that features a giant male, a dirty floor, and a tiny, agitated woman; and the rerun of a game show. But when a plump woman who has correctly guessed the cost of a blender shrieks with delight and jumps up and down and throws her arms around the host to kiss him, she grimaces and switches it off.

  “That’s disgusting!” she tells Dayita. “I’m sure that, as
a self-respecting female, you’ll agree with me.” She plays finger games with her for a while, but she is distracted. You can see it in the way she turns her head suddenly, as though hoping to catch sight of something that lurks just outside the line of her vision. She opens the window all the way. Outside, the wind swoops and dives, scattering leaves and debris. It blows malicious grit into her eyes to make her weep. She rubs at them—a child’s gesture unexpected in a woman who threw herself against the fence of marriage hard enough to knock it down—and sighs as she glances at the clock. It’s only three. “Let’s clean Anju Ma’s bedroom, shall we?” she says.

  It is a surprising decision. Though she is vigilant about keeping the rest of the apartment spotless, Sudha never enters Anju’s bedroom (she thinks of it as his bedroom) on her own. Sometimes when Anju comes back from class, they lie on the bed in there, chatting, but that is only because Anju insists that it’s ridiculous for them to scrunch themselves onto Sudha’s tiny bed when her queen-sized one is sitting empty. Afterward, Sudha smooths from the bedspread every wrinkle that might betray she was there. Long before Sunil comes home, she is in the kitchen, safe behind a barricade of pots, veiled in fragrant steam.

  Armed with sponges and sprays, Sudha enters the bedroom. She moves hesitantly, with trespasser footsteps. “Oh, what a mess!” she exclaims to Dayita, as though in justification—and it is. The dresser is cluttered with medicine bottles and college textbooks that have pushed Sunil’s colognes into a corner. On one end is a small TV-cum-VCR in which Sunil has taken to watching, late at nights, movies that Anju would not approve of if she were awake. Blankets are balled up at the foot of the bed, and Anju’s nightgown and damp towel lie in a heap on the bathroom floor. The toothpaste tube, left open, has bled blue gel onto the counter. Sudha kneels and scrubs the grime-ringed tub. There is an absorbed look on her face as she plies the cleaning brush, as she scrapes crusts of lime from the faucet. This is what she has come to America for: to set her cousin’s life in order. As long as her body is contained by such necessary actions, she need not think beyond them to the blankness which is her future.