Arranged Marriage: Stories (19 page)

“Disgusting,” said the husband, turning away, but the wife, who’d been staring at the woman who had spoken, drew her breath in sharply.

“Isn’t that Sarala?” she said, and started to roll down her window.

“What the hell are you doing!” exclaimed the husband, “Are you crazy? Don’t you realize that these are …?”

“It’s Sarala, I’m sure it is,” said the wife, and leaning out of her window she called breathlessly, “Sarala! Sarala!”

“Put up your window this minute,” shouted the husband. And to the driver, furiously, “Get out of here. Right now. I don’t care how you do it.”

In the back seat, the children, scared by the shouting, had started to cry, but the wife didn’t seem to hear them. Or the sister, who was tugging at the
palloo
of her zari-embroidered sari, pleading for her to sit back.

“Sarala,” she called again. She was struggling with the lock now, trying to open the door as the car inched forward.

The woman creased her eyes and bent to peer into the car’s dark plush interior. The sister stared, fascinated, at the gaping neck of her low-cut blouse, the white powder layering
the cleavage between the breasts. Fumes of cheap perfume and alcohol filled the car. The face—was it the maid’s? How could the wife seem so certain? She herself couldn’t see sufficiently past the plaster of makeup, past the jaded droop of eyelid and mouth, to be sure.

The husband reached across from the front seat and grabbed the wife’s arm, his mouth taut with anger or fear.

But the wife reached out through the window with her other hand, its pale, cool fingers shining with her wedding rings, toward the woman. “Sarala,” she said, “it’s me, Didi.”

The woman stared at her for a moment, then spat. A bloodred wad of betel leaf splattered against the wife’s palm. She sat there looking at it, long after the woman had swung away, long after the husband had jerked her away from the window and ordered the sister to roll it up. After the driver, finding a fortunate gap in the crowd, had roared forward. After the sister, with shaking fingers, had scrubbed and scrubbed at her hand with a lace-edged handkerchief until no trace of the stain was left.

“That was stupid,” the husband snapped as the car, having made it back to the main road, picked up speed. “Those women—they’re no better than animals. She could have done worse—snatched your rings, your bangles, anything.”

“It was Sarala, I know it,” the wife said in a voice of toneless calm which frightened the sister more than any hysterical outburst.

The husband’s mouth was an ugly gash in his face. “That was a whore, do you understand, a
whore.”
But his voice, thought the sister, shook the tiniest bit.

Next morning the wife called the
ayah
to the storeroom and handed her the things the maid had left behind. “Burn them,” she said.

“Everything?” asked the
ayah
, her voice high with shocked disapproval. “Even
this?”
She ran a longing hand over the flawless, petal-soft surface of the saffron sari, finer than anything she ever hoped to own.

“Especially that,” said the wife. Her face seemed composed entirely of planes and angles, as though it would never soften into a smile again.

“But it’s so beautiful—it would be such a waste,” said the
ayah
. A note at once accusing and cajoling crept into her voice. “You could maybe let me have it?”

“Burn it,” shouted the wife. The
ayah
, who had never before heard her mistress raise her voice, backed away in fear. “Didn’t you hear me? Burn it right now if you want to keep your job.”

(“Imagine!” the
ayah
would later say indignantly to the other servants, who had, of course, been given a full account of the evening by the driver. “She threatened to fire me.
Me
, who’s been working for this household twenty years, long before she came into it. And all over a sari she’d given to that slut.”

“Shows you what strong
jadu
that girl worked in the short time she was here,” the cook responded, making a sign to ward off the evil eye.)

The wife shut herself in her room and did not open the
door all day and all night, not when the sister called her for lunch, not when the children, crying at naptime, came looking for her. Even when the husband, back from work, rattled the knob and said,
What nonsense is this now
, she remained inside, so silent that the sister wondered apprehensively if she had done something to harm herself.

But in the morning she rose and took her bath and combed her long wet hair neatly down her back. She put on a sunrise-red
bindi
and a freshly ironed
dhakai
sari and set out office clothes for the husband (who, forced to sleep for the first time in his life in the guest room, had submitted to this indignity with surprising meekness). She summoned the cook and told him what to make for lunch and dinner, reminding him to drain the fried
brinjal
on newspapers before serving it, warning him not to put any chili paste in the children’s chicken curry, nor any
dhania
leaf either, because it always made the little boy throw up. She played Ludo with the children until they went for their nap, then called the sister to come and choose a suitable design, from the Sheffield catalogue that the husband ordered each year from Britain, for the silver dinner set that was to be their wedding gift to her. In the evening she sat on the veranda with the family and served tea in the fragile Wedgewood cups that had been part of her dowry and wiped the children’s mouths and made conversation in a voice calm as the just-watered jasmine bushes that lined the steps.

And it was like this every day till the end of the sister’s visit, as though that brief upheaval of household had never been. As though no one had seen that woman with her tawdry
clothes, her lewd, painted face. Her contempt-filled eyes that came back to haunt the sister—and surely the husband?—when they lay defenseless under the onslaught of sleep. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief that things were back to normal—it had been so discomfiting to have the wife behave in that crazed manner, even for a day.

But sometimes in the heat-encrusted afternoons when the wife looked up from a piece of embroidery to stare through the window bars at the blank yellow sky, the sister felt that something was gone, irrevocably, from her face. How much had she guessed of the maid’s story? It was impossible to tell. A patina of hardness that kept the sister from looking in had descended on her. Over the years it would thicken (though no one except the sister seemed to notice) into a burnished mask that gave away nothing. Watching, the sister would shiver, as though she felt the cold hardening of her own arteries. She would grieve silently and, yes, guiltily (no matter how often she told herself that it wasn’t her fault) for that eager embracive grace which had once made her sister a rare and magical being.

Night has taken over the lawn by the time Deepa Mashi finishes the story. We sit in the dark room, held by the echo of her words, until she reaches over to switch on the lamp. Her cheeks glimmer wetly in the sudden light. “Mashi, you’re crying.”

Mashi laughs embarrassedly, dismissively. “Oh, you know me, I’m too emotional. No wonder Uncle is always
scolding me about it. Any sad story can make me cry. Remember the time we went to see that movie about the kidnapped girl, what was it,
Umrao Jaan
, at the Globe—I went through three handkerchiefs. …”

But there’s something more. I feel it in the uneasy silence that has gathered in the corners of the room, among the houseplants and knick-knacks and wall hangings that look suddenly dusty and sad, as though they embodied some unendingly futile human endeavor—a search for beauty, a belief in luck. A hope that happiness will endure. My aunt’s beleaguered world is not the simple one I have always taken it to be.

“Mashi,” I ask, “why did you tell me this story?”

Mashi fidgets, uncomfortable with the bald, western habit I’ve acquired of going at things head on. It isn’t proper, womanly, safe.

“I don’t know,” she finally says, not looking at me.

She’s not telling me everything, I sense it. Is this a cautionary parable for brides-to-be? An ancestral tale taken from some outlying branch of our convoluted family tree? Then it strikes me—but without surprise, as though the realization had lain in my subconscious throughout the telling. The events could have happened to my own mother. The child that died of cholera, along with my father, was a boy. He could well have been the baby in the story, and I the little girl.

I try to push aside the cobwebbed years to get at those pre-epidemic days before my mother moved with me to the small flat (more suited to a widow’s lifestyle and finances) where I grew up, the home where she still lives, the home
which appears in all my dreams of childhood—and my nightmares. And now it seems I remember an old house—long marble halls, bright magenta bougainvillea trailing the balcony, the cool whirr of fans in high-ceilinged bedrooms. Once unleashed, the images will not stop: afternoon games of Ludo and checkers, my father’s cologne-scented kiss as I run down the graveled driveway, dodging the
mali’s
hose, to the black Studebaker that brought him home. Lullabies sung in a country accent haunting as the moonlight that glimmered in the palm trees.

I tell myself that it’s only my aunt’s storytelling taking root in my overfertile imagination. But I’m sure they happened to me, those sun-filled balcony mornings when I sat at the feet of a woman with a smile sweeter than palm-honey. Her hands were a gentle wind in my hair. When she lifted me onto her lap—
come, Khuku
—awkwardly, around the growing curve of her belly, I never wanted her to set me down. A woman so different from the mother I know that I want to hit out at someone, to shatter something, to scream until I have no breath left. For a moment I feel the burden of guilt my aunt must bear and wonder if her loving of me, all these years, has been in part an attempt at reparation.

The others, they existed too—the cranky
ayah
with her bark-wrinkled face, the deaf aunt whose snores cut through my sleep like a raspy saw, the sweaty cook who made the divinest rice pudding, thickly studded with sugared almonds and fat golden raisins. The slim girl with long hair who played catch with me in the gloom of evening under the
lichu
trees and read to me of jinns and water witches in a shivery, silvery voice.

And that last evening—I’m not just giving form to my aunt’s words when I see it again. The forbidden street filled with the bitter scent of drying marigold and jasmine. A woman’s lips twisted in a sneer that is perhaps her defense against heartbreak. A man’s dark face where fear battles rage. My mother curling her fingers around the red stain in her palm as though around a wound that will never heal, while the brightness drains from her face.

“It’s my mother’s story, isn’t it,” I say to Mashi.

“Oh dear!” Mashi wrings her hands in agitation. “What an idea! It’s just a story—I should never have brought it up.”

I know she will not tell me any more. It’s how we survive, we Indian women whose lives are half light and half darkness, stopping short of revelations that would otherwise crisp away our skins. I’m left alone to figure the truth of the story, to puzzle out why it was given to me.

And then, along the illogical byways of thought, Bijoy’s face flashes against my raw, aching eyelids, handsome and charming and full of laughter, but also—I have never admitted this before—implacable. I wonder if the story (though not intended as such by my aunt) is a warning for me, a preview of my own life which I thought I had fashioned so cleverly, so differently from my mother’s, but which is only a repetition, in a different raga, of her tragic song. Perhaps it is like this for all daughters, doomed to choose for ourselves, over and over, the men who have destroyed our mothers.

“It’s late,” says Deepa Mashi. “I’d better start dinner. Uncle will be
so
annoyed if he finds out how I’ve been wasting the afternoon away on silly stories.” But she doesn’t move, and
when I reach for her hand, she holds tightly to my fingers. We sit like this, two women caught in the repeating, circular world of shadow and memory, watching where the last fight, silky and fragile, has spilled itself just above the horizon like the
palloo
of a saffron sari.

THE
DISAPPEARANCE