The Vine of Desire: A Novel Read online

  I go back to the park day after day to see her. She is so unlike any woman I’ve ever met. And I am so hungry.

  Each time she gives me a little piece of herself.

  Her name is Sara. In India it was something else. Saraswati? Sarayu? Sarojini? She doesn’t tell me. It’s not important, not at this time in her life. Does she believe that her name will wait for her, obedient as a brooch one has put aside because it is too old-fashioned, until she is ready to wear it again?

  “I came here as an exchange student,” she says. “It was only going to be for a year. I was all set to go back and get married to a guy I’d met in college in Bombay. Then, about a month before my return, it hit me that for the rest of my life I’d never have another chance to be alone. In-laws, kids, servants, you know how it is in India. Scary. So I bought myself a bus ticket to California. A last bit of adventure, I thought. Disneyland, Universal Studios, the Golden Gate Bridge—the usual tourist shit. I’d planned on being back by the end of the week, but the Greyhound broke down halfway between LA and San Francisco. Like it was fate.”

  She got off the bus and walked into the dunes. She hitched rides along Highway 1, learning the names of trees as she went. Scarlet gum, Madrona, ironbark. Somewhere between a grove of cypresses and a rock on which seals sunned themselves, she got addicted.

  All those years of Fair and Lovely Skin Lightening Lotion and Arnica Hair Vitalizer! She let her face grow dark in the sun. She let her hair coil into dreadlocks for a while, then cut it all off. She pierced her nose, her eyebrow, but let the holes close up after a while. When her visa expired, she took all the money she had left and bought a secondhand car. Sometimes, that’s where she sleeps.

  She laughs at my expression. “Don’t look so scandalized! It isn’t hard. I love the freedom, the risk. It’s like being in a play.”

  “What about your parents?”

  She shrugs. “I send them postcards. That way they know I’m okay, but they can’t get to me! When I’m ready to go back to them, I’ll call, and they’ll send me a ticket.”

  I want to dislike her selfishness, her arrogant confidence that she’ll be loved, always. I want to ask, What if they don’t want you back? But I’m caught in the net of her stories.

  “You got to get out of this valley, girl,” she says. “See the other Americas. There’s too many men chasing after sex and money here, who think the word no doesn’t apply to them.”

  Getting out. How delicious the words sound. I want the recipe for them. But she’s already telling me how, in Yellowstone Park, a black bear’s eye gleamed amber when the beam from her flashlight hit it. Did I know that in Yosemite, you can see rainbows forming above waterfalls on a full-moon night? In Las Vegas, there are fake Grecian palaces that spring from flat Nevada earth, white as a columned mirage in the dry desert air. She’s watched extravaganzas in hotels as big as townships where a grid-metal floor can sink underwater to transform a stage into a thirty-foot-deep diving pool. But each time the Bay Area reeled her back in.

  She tells me about a month she spent in the Haight with a man. They made love under a goose-down quilt in a room with no heat and ate Thai takeout. Sometimes they drove up to Napa to buy a bottle of wine, and finished it in the car on the way back. His skin was like cumin powder. His hair was dark and springy, like wool from some midnight animal. She would work her fingers into it when she was cold.

  Where did this girl from India learn such recklessness? Who taught her to care so little for what people might think?

  She laughs some more at the look on my face. Today she’s wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans. Black ankle-high boots. She looks attractive and dangerous, a bandit lady.

  “How about money?” I ask.

  “When I’m broke, I come down to San Jose. I know a woman here—she finds me jobs.”

  My heart starts beating fast. “What kind of job?” I ask.

  “Depends on what you know, and what you’re prepared to do! Lupe can get you almost anything. She’s a woman of connections, as they say. Sometimes I’m in a hurry to make a fast buck and leave, but this time I wanted a change. I wanted something laid back. Respectable. So I’m Joshua’s nanny, at least for the moment.” She unstraps the little boy in the stroller. “Go eat some sand,” she says, handing him a plastic bucket and shovel, giving his diapered behind a not-ungentle smack. He toddles off equably.

  “Do you think she could find me a job?” I ask. Even saying the words makes me flush. If Anju could hear me …

  She looks at me appraisingly. “So. You want a job.” I steel myself for the questions. Why do you need to work? Don’t you have a husband to take care of you? But maybe Sara has moved away from such Indian ways of thought. She only says, “Let me check with Lupe.”

  I should give her something in thanks and reciprocation. But I’m not ready to speak of a life which hulks at my back like a burned house.

  Behind me in the sand pit I hear screams. Dayita! She’s taken hold of Joshua’s bucket with both her hands and is set on wresting it from him. When he resists, she lowers her head and—before I can run to them—bites his arm. Joshua lets go of the bucket and stares at the small red indentations that mark his skin. Then he begins to wail. Dayita makes use of this opportunity to grab the bucket and scuttle away, unrepentant.

  I’m aghast. From where did my daughter inherit this ferocity? Not from me, surely. Nor her father. His fault was always the opposite. Is it then his mother’s legacy, passed down the indifferent channelways of blood to the granddaughter whose life she wanted to prevent?

  “Hey, no big deal,” says Sara. “All kids act like brats sometimes.” She rocks Joshua until he calms down, then gives him his bottle. “Don’t take it so hard,” she adds, touching my shoulder. “Not everything your kid does is your fault. My poor mother did whatever she could to bring me up as a good Indian girl. Bharatnatyam lessons, elocution classes, a convent education, the works. And look at me! Don’t scold the kid too much, okay? She’s just a baby.” She waits until I give a reluctant nod. “Listen, I’ll call Lupe over the weekend. Why don’t you give me your number—I’ll let you know what she says.”

  I tell her Anju’s number, and she writes it on the back of her palm with a red ballpoint pen. “Please call only between nine and four on weekdays,” I say, and am grateful when she doesn’t ask why. I watch her slim black silhouette until she is gone.

  To live like Sara in the present, in adventure. To not care about the worms curled inside the apple of your future. Is that ever possible, once you have become a mother?

  I shouldn’t blame motherhood. From the day I was born, I had a worry in each eye.

  I break my promise to Sara and scold Dayita all the way back. I can’t help it. How can Sara, who’s not a mother, know how frightening it is to be responsible for another life?

  My words have no effect. Dayita leans back in the stroller and observes the zigzag lights in the windows of record shops. She turns her head to watch the yellow arch of a McDonald’s as we pass. The first streetlamps are cat eyes, making her smile. From time to time she sings baby words to herself. How well she has learned, already, the art of ignoring mothers.

  Tonight, Anju asked if she could have Dayita to sleep with her, just for a bit.

  “If she wakes up in the night and wants to be nursed, I’ll bring her back to you,” she said. “Promise!”

  “She doesn’t nurse anymore.”

  “Great!” said Anju. “Now she can sleep with Sunil and me half the time. That way, we’ll be able to cuddle up with her, and you’ll get some rest.”

  I wanted to say, That kind of rest I don’t need. I wanted to tell my cousin, whom I’d once loved more than myself, Don’t touch her, she’s mine.

  Anju held out her arms and Dayita jumped into them, not a backward glance. Anju spun her around until she screamed with excitement. They laughed all the way to Anju’s bedroom.

  It’s past midnight. Lying here, I think I still hear them laughing. Sunil’s deep
er tones join theirs. But of course they’re asleep. A little moonlight, pale and sickly, trickles into this room full of my daughter’s absence. Her smell is pungence and wild grass. The tindery odor of stubbornness. I take a baby blanket and press my face into it. Even my teeth hurt with loneliness. My mind whips about. East and west, east and west. I want my daughter to be loved by Sunil and Anju. I want her for myself alone. I want to help Anju get back to her old, strong self. I want Lupe to find me a job so I can escape this apartment. The river of my life is speeding toward an abyss. What shall I do? I want an existence iridescent as nail polish. I want sleep. I want to bite into the apple of America. I want to swim to India, to the parrot-green smells of childhood. I want a mother’s arms to weep in. I want my weather-vane mind to stop its manic spinning. I want Sunil.

  Seven

  Beyond the mouth of the bay, past where the slender rust-red bridge sways in a rare silence, the fog rises before dawn. Here the water is deeper, colder. Things go on below the surface—the willful tug of currents which want to take you beyond everything you know, the invisible smile of water creatures coiling and uncoiling.

  The fog rises like a long exhalation and begins its journey. Over the white city lit in the last of the moonlight, its buildings dulling to old silver as the fog flows over them. Down the tangled skeins of 280 and 101, where lone cars leave tracers of light as they speed from one dream to another, newer one. Southward, the rail lines, the alleys flanking the stations of Palo Alto and Menlo Park, where men and women huddle under worn jute bags just a block away from five-star restaurants with French names. The fog touches their hair with its finger, leaving swaths of white behind. It passes the dark glass rectangles of office buildings where the lights are never turned off, looks in through the windows at programmers stretched out in restive exhaustion under their desks, their heads filled with neon words: angel, beta, IPO. In San Jose, it moves through downtown parks strewn with newspapers and used needles, by-products of the Silicon Rush. In the underpasses, abandoned grocery carts, urine, a smell like burnt sugar. The fog circles the garishly hopeful banners of small stores in Vietnam Town; it sweeps its hem like a benediction over apartment buildings clustered like aphids along the freeway.

  It is the year of random malice, the year the W4 worm will topple networks like dominoes around the globe, the year when drive-by shootings will account for 129 deaths across America.

  Now the sun staggers into the sky, leaving yolky smears behind. Buses and garbage trucks groan and rattle, people blink into bathroom mirrors in disbelief of themselves. Anju and Sunil, too, Dayita and Sudha, they begin their awkward morning cotillion. KCBS announces that 237 is backed up all the way to Montague, and advises commuters to take an alternate route. Eating his cereal, Sunil swears. The alternate routes, he knows, will be just as backed up. He rinses out his bowl and wipes it with a dish towel. Leaving, he shuts the door behind him quietly. It is no use, he knows, to take out one’s frustration on the necessary objects of one’s life. In the bathroom, standing under a fall of warm water, Anju imagines a shower that will never end. Sudha knocks on the door, An-ju, An-ju, syllables drawn out in worry or impatience. Listening, Dayita slips her thumb into her mouth. Her eyes are as black as bees.

  The fog witnesses all of this. It is breaking up, like the memory of an old promise you know you made but can’t figure out why. The last strips of it drift into the small, slit mouths of the mailboxes that wait in the entryway. Later, when Sudha comes to check, she will find two letters there.

  One is an invitation on a heavy cream parchment, addressed to Sunil Majumdar and Family. The other is a pale blue aerogram, the black Calcutta postmark blooming blotchily over a stamp that bears Indira Gandhi’s haughty, surprised profile. Sudha’s name, in square, male letters, a handwriting that makes her draw her breath in sharply. The name on the back says Ashok. She holds it as though she cannot decide whether she should press it to her chest, or fling it into the Dumpster that hulks in the parking lot. Finally, she does neither. Lately she is growing into a woman of cautious gestures, movements that give little away. She turns neatly on her heel and returns to the apartment.

  We want Sudha to open her letter, but she goes about her daily chores with exasperating meticulousness. Measure the rice: two cups. Leave it to soak in three and a half cups of warm water. Set out the chicken for thawing. Use the blender to grind six cloves, two teaspoons of coriander and cumin seed, a jar-lid full of peppercorns, three red chilies and a stick of cinnamon. Change Dayita’s diaper. Give her a snack: apple juice in a no-spill cup, Froot Loops in a plastic bowl.

  The two letters sit on the kitchen counter, side by side, calm cream, calm blue, like a husband and wife who have been married a long time.

  What fibers of steel are woven into Sudha’s will that she can go about her work like this, not giving in to the need to know?

  Take a load of clothes down to the laundry room. Dust the furniture. Give Dayita an oil massage and then her bath. Chop the vegetables and stir-fry carefully with mustard seed—it’s zucchini today, and if you leave it on the stove too long, it turns to mush. Dayita wants a bottle. Turn the stove low, warm the milk, add a pinch of sugar—an old Indian habit, a hope that the child’s life will be filled with sweetness. Put her in the crib and run down to throw the clothes in the dryer. Marinate the chicken in a paste of turmeric, yogurt, and salt.

  Perhaps it is not strength that keeps her from opening the letter. Maybe Ashok’s letter is a painful reminder of the prospects she gave up in order to come here, into this disappointing, disturbing existence. Or is she saving it, a deferred treat, the way children hide candy in their pockets to enjoy in the sticky secrecy of their room?

  The chicken simmers in the pot, filling the room with the centuries-old smell of garam masala. Sudha zips her wind-breaker, smooths down her hair, the folds of her sari. In the mirror, her reflection looks dissatisfied.

  “I wish I had a pair of jeans,” she tells Dayita, who is trying to climb into her stroller. “I think I’ll scream if one more stranger comes up and tells me how much they love my costume. Maybe I should borrow a few things from Anju.” But her voice is reluctant. “No, don’t climb in yet,” she adds sharply. “Wait till we get downstairs. NO, Dayita! Don’t you hear me?”

  She turns off the chicken, checks the catches on the windows. Last week, someone broke into the apartment downstairs and trashed it. The police think it’s the tenant’s ex-boyfriend, but Sunil grumbles that the neighborhood’s going to the dogs. She grabs a protesting Dayita in one hand, the stroller in the other. At the door she stops and comes back to pick up the letter.

  In the park Sudha pauses the way she does each day now and looks around. Expectation flickers over her face like a match-stick flame. She’s looking for Sara of the cutoff jeans, Sara the adventurous, who has promised her entry into the real American life, and—more importantly—escape from herself. But it’s as though the woman has disappeared, as though she had only been a figment of Sudha’s wanting. She bites her lip and sets Dayita down near the slides. Dayita holds up a fistful of sand to show Sudha.

  “Mama! Mama!”

  “Yes, shona, I’m watching,” says Sudha. “That’s very good, shona. Just don’t get any into your eyes.” She nods encouragingly, but she’s thinking about another place, another life. The past tugs at her with its blue aerogram fingers.

  Sudha takes the letter out of her pocket and turns it over and over.

  When she’d been in America for two weeks, Anju finally asked her the question she’d been expecting ever since she got here. Why did you turn Ashok down?

  Sudha shrugged. She’d imagined the question many times, practiced the shrug, the careful answer.

  “Tell me!”

  “What’s the point of going over what’s done with, finished? We need to put the past behind us, both you and I.”

  Anju shook her head. “I can’t put it behind me until I know. I keep thinking you did it because of me, because you’d promis
ed to come and be with me. It makes me feel terrible, like I ruined your life all over again. Like you sacrificed yourself for me.”

  “I’ve given up sacrificing myself for others. It leaves you with the worst hangover.”

  “Quit joking.”

  “I turned him down because I didn’t want him to have to take care of me,” Sudha said. “I wanted to be independent. And it seemed like America was the best place for that.”

  “But don’t you love him?”

  Sudha ignored the question. “So, as you see, it was a wholly selfish decision.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Anju said. “At least not that last part, about you being selfish.”

  “Dear Anju, everyone is selfish in the end!”

  Anju had laughed, but uneasily. There was a new hardness in her cousin’s eyes. An opaqueness, as though she wasn’t telling Anju the whole truth. In order to survive, Sudha had had to learn many things. Could selfishness be one of them?

  Staring at Ashok’s letter, Sudha thinks, This man I loved. But love is a code sketched in dust. You look away, the wind blows, the pattern shifts, and when you look again, you discover it says something else. She inserts a finger under the flap and pulls until the aerogram tears jaggedly along the crease.

  Dearest Sudha,

  For months now I have been waiting impatiently for a letter from you. At first I told myself that it was because you were settling into an unfamiliar environment. There were many pressures on you, many calls on your time. You were meeting Anju after so long, you had a lot of catching up to do, a lot of help to give. It was enough to consume anyone’s attention.

  But now it has been three months, and I’m beginning to worry. Sudha, why this silence? All the things I said to you, sitting by the Ganges, have you forgotten them? Is America enticing you away with its glitter? And most of all—I am afraid to ask this—is there someone else?