Sister of My Heart Read online

  “Where on earth did Aunt N dig that up from?” I say, grimacing.

  “Maybe she special-ordered it,” Sudha says, wiping her eyes.

  “She must have said to the bedspread maker, I want something that will teach my wild and wicked daughter the proper womanly virtues,” I add, “and the bedspread maker must have said, Madam, by the time she’s finished embroidering the hundredth Param Guru, I gurarantee you she’ll be the perfect wife.”

  We laugh again, our voices high and shaky, the way you laugh when you’ve been too close to the edge. We decide that if Sudha puts extra-long tails on the peacocks, it’ll cover up the writing and no one will know the difference. We seal our conspiracy with a kiss.

  But that night, lying in a tangle of damp bedsheets in the hot dark, my heart still aches like someone ripped it in two and then stitched the torn edges roughly together with one of those thick needles the streetside muchis use to repair our sandals. I can’t stop wondering why Sudha had made that strange comment about not being who I thought she was. What could have possibly happened to shake her belief in herself? In us? And why, for the first time in our lives, had she chosen to keep something so important from me?

  THE NEW MOVIE had taken Calcutta by storm. Everywhere there were billboards, larger and brighter than life, depicting the hero and heroine. She in her exquisite gold-worked dancing skirt and dupatta, the innocent virgin in the midst of a corrupt court. Or weeping in the clutches of the evil nabab as her prince rushes on horseback to her rescue. At school the girls couldn’t stop whispering about how romantic it was, the lovers singing of eternal passion as they sail on a moonlit river. And then, just as they are to marry, his stern patrician father denouncing her because she is only a dancing girl. Her lovely eyes filling with tears as she decides to leave rather than ruin her beloved’s good name. Every paan shop in the city played the songs, “Chalo dildaar chalo, Come with me, heart of my heart, to the other side of the moon.” And “Saari raat chalte chalte, Traveling all night, miraculously, I have found you.” Every young woman’s heart beat faster as she listened, humming the words under her breath. Every young man’s heart must have beat faster too. But of that I was not sure. Thanks to the vigilance of the mothers, Anju and I did not know any young men.

  We moved in a world of women, my cousin and I, at home and outside. It was a world of filtered, submarine light, languid movements, eyes looking out from behind a frieze. Small muted sounds: the tinkling of bangles, female laughter. In our house the few menservants did not come up beyond the ground floor. And Singhji—although his deformity seemed to place him in a separate, androgynous zone—never entered the house at all.

  At our all-girls convent school, no men were allowed past the darwan who guarded the gate, zealously twirling his metal-tipped lathi, making even the fathers wait on the street. At the few social occasions we attended, weddings or pujas, we sat among our women relatives, webbed around with gossip and song and old tales. Perhaps because we had no fathers, that other world—sweat and sunlight, male cologne, a man’s voice raised in a command to a passing servant—seemed distant and full of mystery, like the dim roar of an ocean seen through a telescope.

  Our existence was restrictive, yes. But I found it curiously comforting too.

  I knew most sixteen-year-old girls in Calcutta didn’t live like we did. I saw them on our way to school, pushing onto crowded buses, bargaining loudly with the roadside vegetable sellers as they shopped for their mothers, unabashedly fingering the lau and karala, pinching the sheem beans to check for freshness. Groups of teenagers gay as butterflies summoned the Qwality man and bought orange ices, giggling and wiping at their bright mouths when they were done. Women, young and old, hailed taxis and climbed in, on their way to New Market or Dalhausie; some maneuvered their scooters to work through streets packed with buses and pedestrians and stray cows, honking authoritatively. And once in a while in the dim alleyways where the flower sellers had their shops, I saw a girl holding hands with a young man, lowering her shy eyes as he pinned a garland to her hair.

  And their clothes. Salwaar kameezes shot through with metallic thread, gauzy dupattas allowed to slide artfully off shoulders. The westernized ones in jeans, or narrow-cut skirts that showed off their rounded hips, their slender ankles. Their saris, when they did wear them, were in the latest filmi designs and not the traditional bordered handlooms the mothers bought for us. Their summer blouses, generously sleeveless and cut low in the back, drew whistles from the streetside Romeos who leaned endlessly against the corner buildings, and made me blush.

  How bold and fascinating these women were. How uncaring of that fragile glass flower, reputation, that lay at the heart of Anju’s life and mine. They were all that we, as daughters of the Chatterjees, yearned for and knew we could not be. Had our fathers been alive, the mothers might have been more lenient with us. But Gouri Ma’s promise to her dead husband seemed to have frozen our entire household, like the magic spell which, in Pishi’s stories, shrouded palaces in timeless sleep.

  I accepted this, but Anju never stopped fighting. “Why must Ramur Ma go with us every time we leave the house, even to get books from the neighborhood library?” she’d ask. “Why can’t we go to Sushmita’s birthday party when all the other girls in class are going, instead of sending a gift with Singhji? No wonder everyone thinks we’re stuck up.” And “I’m tired of these old-women saris you make us wear. You’d think we were living in the Dark Ages instead of in the eighties. I bet there isn’t another girl my age in all of Calcutta—except poor Sudha, of course—who’s forced to dress like this. Why can’t I wear pants, or a maxi, or at least some kurtas once in a while?”

  “Why, why, why,” my mother would say. “Uff, my head hurts with all your questions. Why can’t you be quiet and let your elders, who know more of the world than you, make the important decisions?”

  “We’d know as much about the world as you,” Anju would retort, “if you didn’t keep us penned in at home all the time like—like prize cows.”

  “Did you hear that, Didi?” Mother would cry, turning to Gouri Ma. Loud with outrage, her voice made my ears hurt and my stomach muscles clench up. “Did you hear how your daughter talked back to me? Never in all my years did I hear a child in my parents’ home speak so rudely. Are you going to let her get away with this kind of behavior? No wonder my Sudha’s getting so stubborn nowadays. I can see where she’s learning it.”

  Then everyone would be talking at once, Anju shouting, “Leave Sudha out of it, she never said a word, you’re always criticizing her for no reason.” And my mother: “See, Didi? See what I mean.” And Pishi, placating: “Don’t mind what the girl says, Nalini, you know how she is, born under the sign of the bull, never thinking what to speak and what not to speak before the words tumble from her mouth.” Until finally Gouri Ma would look up from the accounts book, which she brought home each evening, worry smudged like lampblack into the creases of her face.

  “Please, quiet everyone. Quiet!”

  And in the reluctant silence that followed she’d tell Anju, “The last promise I made to your father was that if anything happened to him I’d bring you up the way he wanted. The way a daughter of the Chatterjee family should be. You know that.”

  Those words would have been enough to silence me. And her voice, somber and a little removed—the kind of voice I imagined the queens of Pishi’s tales to have.

  Anju didn’t give up, though. “What’s more important, a living daughter’s happiness, or a promise you made to a dead man, who’s dead because he abandoned us to run after some stupid scheme?”

  “Don’t talk about your father like that,” Pishi cried sharply. “You ungrateful, disrespectful child.”

  “Or is it because I’m a daughter that my happiness doesn’t matter?” Anju’s breath came in gasps, and her voice wobbled as it always did just before she cried. “I bet if I were a boy you wouldn’t be saying no to me all the time like this.”

  “Hai bhagaban!” m
y mother said, turning her appealing eyes toward heaven. “Now she demands to be treated like a son.”

  “I am thinking of your happiness, keeping doors open to houses you might want to enter someday,” Gouri Ma said. “But I don’t expect you to see that yet.” It seemed there was a wistfulness, subtle as the echoing end of a raga, in her usually practical voice. But perhaps I was only being fanciful, for the next moment she sent us off to our rooms to do our homework.

  She convinced me. But she never convinced my headstrong Anju, who kicked at the marble banister carved with lions all the way up the stairs.

  And so this morning Anju whispers, as we stand in the senior girls assembly line at school, “Let’s cut class in the afternoon and go see the new movie, okay?”

  “Are you crazy?” I say. Shock makes me forget to whisper, and Sister Baptista, the assembly monitor, turns toward me, her steel-rimmed glasses glittery with disapproval.

  “Don’t be such a coward,” Anju says without moving her lips—a feat which never fails to impress me—while she offers Sister an angel-innocent smile. “We’ve run off before, remember?”

  “And got caught, which you’ve conveniently forgotten. Don’t you remember how upset Gouri Ma was?” I whisper as softly as I can, but a wave of sibilant sound seems to ripple from my lips and Sister gives me a frightful frown.

  “We were a lot younger then,” Anju says, “and we didn’t know how not to get caught.” She ignores the last part of my sentence.

  “But we promised Gouri Ma—” I start to say. Her face rises in my mind, austere as a Bodhisattva statue I had once seen at the Calcutta museum. She had looked at me and Anju with such reproach—or is it the future I am envisioning? Since that terrible afternoon when I had learned that mothers could lie and fathers deceive, time coils in upon itself at moments, confusing me.

  “I should’ve known better than to ask you, little Miss Holiness,” snaps Anju. “All you ever want is to get into Mother’s good books. You’re probably just waiting to get home so you can tell her my plan. Well, I don’t care! I’m going to go whether you come or not.”

  Somehow I cannot be upset with Anju when she is in a temper like this, for I can see that behind the anger, her eyes are bright with tears she will not let fall. Dear Anju, for whom love means that we must want the same thing, always. That we must be the same. She has not yet learned that ultimately each person—even Anjali and Basudha—is distinct, separate. That ultimately we are each alone.

  The thought catches me by surprise. When had I realized this? Was it on that afternoon of secrets, that afternoon of new blood and old tears? Was it on the day of the diamond earrings when I asked Anju why she loved me, and she gave me her answer, sweeter than a sudden spring in the desert of my heart? When had I made the decision not to burden her with the terrible knowledge that ate at me like a canker bug? When had I promised myself that I would spend the rest of my life making up to her for the way in which my father had deceived hers? The way he had tempted him to his death?

  Ah, how much older than Anju my promise makes me feel.

  “Sudha,” Anju hisses, and I turn to her to say—what? What words can I speak with my throat, which has turned blue as Lord Shiva’s from the poison I’ve swallowed so that Anju might continue to laugh and love and quarrel and make up? So that she might take for granted the surety of our intimacy the way I no longer can?

  But I am saved by Sister Baptista, who announces in her sternest tones to the entire room that Basudha Chatterjee is to move to the troublemaker’s row in the front of the room, this instant, for talking in assembly.

  As I walk forward, feeling the prick of a hundred eyes on my face, the smirks that say, Ah, finally one of the Chatterjee girls gets what she deserves, I hear Anju say, very softly, “If you were my true, true sister, you’d come with me.”

  On the streets it is so hot that the melted pitch sticks to our chappals. The cold-drink vendors with their carts filled with bright orange Fantas and pale yellow Juslas, the slabs of ice sweating under jute sacking, have gone home, having sold out of everything. But the cool darkness of the cinema is a magic country, no less wonderful than the images glimmering bright as jewels on the screen. Air-conditioned breezes wash over us like a blessing, and the slow whoosh of the ceiling fans is as comforting as a whispered lullaby.

  Not that I can even imagine sleep.

  I’ve been to the cinema a few times before—to educational English films with Gouri Ma and, with my mother, to the sentimental Bengali movies that always make her cry. But I’ve never felt this excitement, this tingling that starts in my toes and fingertips and rises hotly up my body to my throat, my cheeks. To my lips, until they feel swollen and pleasantly sore, as though they’ve been kissed (but here I have to rely on imagination) by a man’s rough mouth.

  Part of the reason is our new clothes. Anju stopped in the bazaar next to the cinema and bought us each one of the forbidden kurta outfits. “We can’t go to see the movie in our school uniforms,” she’d said, quick-thinking as ever. “Everyone would know we’d cut class. They’d be sure to stare, and then someone might recognize us.”

  “Where did you get the money?” I asked, watching the wad of notes that had appeared, miraculously, in her hand.

  “It’s my birthday money,” she said, laughing. “This year I didn’t buy books with it. I had a feeling I’d need it for something else.”

  And so in the damp, dimly lit jenana bathroom we changed into the bright kurtas that lay light as wings on our skin. I looked down at my legs in tight-fitting churidar pants, and marveled at their shapeliness. I couldn’t take my eyes from my breasts, how they rose and fell under the thin fabric colored like pomegranate flowers. How rapidly the pulse in the hollow of my throat beat above the oval neckline of the kurta.

  “Final touch,” said Anju as she took from her schoolbag a black eye pencil and—yes, a lipstick. From where? But I didn’t ask. I was learning that my cousin had her secrets too.

  We darkened each other’s eyes with inexpert fingers and outlined each other’s mouths with the lipstick, which was a rich maroon quite unsuitable for young girls. But we were reckless by now, giggling as we loosened our braided hair to fall in waves around our flushed faces. When we turned to the mirror to admire ourselves, I was shocked at how grown-up we looked, as though we had crossed over a threshold into the house of adulthood. As though there would be no turning back.

  “Oh, Sudha,” Anju breathed. “You look stunning. People will be looking at you instead of watching the actresses on the screen.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I replied, giving her a little push. But I was pleased. We stuffed our uniforms into our schoolbags and went to get our tickets.

  We are lucky: We have good seats, with an unobstructed view of the screen, and though the theater is crowded, there’s an empty seat next to mine where I thankfully drop my schoolbag. I had been nervous about who I would have to sit next to. Whenever we went to the movies with the mothers, they sat on the outer edges, buffers between us and the world. For a heartbeat, I miss their protective presence.

  But the hall is so fascinating with its high ceilings and cornices embossed with plaster flowers, the rich red velvet of its stage curtain, its aisles that give off a sweetish smell like the zarda that women chew after meals. And the people. Even after the start of the film, which is marvelously romantic and sad, just as I had imagined, I can’t stop watching them. The light from the screen casts an unearthy glow on their rapt faces, wiping away lines, lifting away years. As they smile, or touch a handkerchief to their eyes, they appear strangely, heart-catchingly innocent. And yet so mysterious. Even Anju, in the seat next to mine, emotions flitting like moonlit clouds over her face, seems like someone I do not know at all.

  Then a male voice says, “Excuse me, is someone sitting here?”

  Just my luck! The last thing I want is a strange man sitting next to me, ruining my pleasure in the movie by whistling or making crude kissing sounds during the roman
tic scenes. I’d heard schoolmates complaining of such things. Maybe I can tell him that a friend is sitting here, that she’s just stepped out for a moment?

  But when I look at him, I know I need not worry.

  “How could you know, Madam Experience? How many men have you talked to in your lifetime?” Anju would say later. “As it happens, he got us into an awful lot of trouble.”

  Sometimes you just know, I would tell her. And the trouble we got into was not his fault.

  In the pearl-blue light of the theater, the man’s—but he was not much more than a boy himself—eyes glimmer, dark and bright in turns. His smile is at once open and apologetic. His hair tumbles over his forehead. Charmingly, I think.

  “Awfully sorry to disturb you, but I think this is my seat.” He holds out his ticket toward me, pointing to the number. The cleft in his chin can break a girl’s heart.

  I lift my schoolbag from the chair. To keep myself from smiling I stare sternly, fixedly at the screen, where the hero has just boarded a night train. In a moment he will see the sleeping heroine and fall in love, unequivocally, irreversibly, in the way of true passion, world without end.

  But I can’t stop myself from looking, just once, out of the corner of my eye.

  He’s intelligent, I can tell that just by how he holds himself, his body relaxed yet alert. Probably a college student, from St. Xavier’s maybe. Or Presidency. Open at the throat, his white shirt is very clean and smells of mint. And when, heart pounding, I raise my eyes a little higher, his lips are smiling. At me.