Arranged Marriage: Stories (31 page)

I’ll take one of the dusty suitcases from under the bed. Half the money from the savings account. My wedding jewelry. My car. That would keep me for a few months. There
were cheap motels in the little towns on the peninsula, Redwood City, San Mateo. Rooming houses. And even in the city, in the not-so-good areas. Some of them run by Indians. I’d seen them on a news show a while back. Maybe someone would let me stay for a lower rate if I did some work. Filing, accounts, even cleaning rooms.

We’re spiraling toward hate. And hopelessness. That’s not what I want for the rest of my life. Or yours
.

I’ll go to that Mughal restaurant. Offer to cook for free for a few days. Surely when the owner saw how good I was he’d give me the job.

Sitting on the guest bed now in a house that had never, for all its comforts, been my home, I closed my eyes and tried to see my new life—not as I wanted but as it really would be. Struggling to maneuver enormous skillets and saucepans and tandoor ovens in a vast, dark kitchen with the smell of old grease heavying the air, amid the heat and the sweat and the curse words of the rushing waiters. Living in a one-room apartment above some garage where on my off-days I heated soup over a burner. Scrubbing the buckling linoleum in a motel toilet off of Highway 101.

It’s better this way, each of us freeing the other before it’s too late …

Yes, I believe it—I have to believe it. In spite of my beautiful, calm kitchen which I must leave behind. In spite of the pity in the eyes of the Indian women when they hear. The gossip in India. My parents’ anger. Family dishonor. In spite of Ashok, the empty ache when I remember—as I know I will—the feel of his body next to me in bed, his hair smelling of mint leaves and dried rain.

… so we can start learning, once more, to live
.

And Srikant—no, I won’t think about him now. There’ll be time enough for that later on, when I’ve begun to pull the unraveled edges of my existence into a new design, one I cannot guess at yet.

I tore a sheet out of the notebook.

Dear Ashok
, I began.

MEETING
MRINAL

I
WAS TAKING A
M
R
. P’
S
P
EPPERONI
P
IZZA OUT OF THE
freezer when I heard the front door slam. A moment later Dean, as my teenage son Dinesh prefers to be addressed, sauntered into the kitchen.

“Hi, Mom!” he said, running his hands through his hair which, since his latest visit to the barber, stands up like the bristles of a scrubbing brush.

The last of the sun glinted on his stud earring, making me blink. He was wearing his favorite T-shirt, black, with MEGADETH slashed across it in bloodred letters. I tried not to sigh. At least he wasn’t wearing his other favorite, in purple and neon pink, bearing the legend
Suicidal Tendencies
.

“Gourmet pizza again, I see.” Now the sun glinted on his teeth as well.

I didn’t know exactly how to read that smile—so many things were different about Dinesh in the last eleven months,
since his father left. “Is that OK with you?” I asked, feeling a little guilty. “Shall I fix you something else?”

“Nah, don’t bother, pizza’s fine with me.” He shrugged, beginning to turn away.

“Dinesh …” I started, then broke off. I wanted to run my hand along the roughness of his cheek, to ask him, like I used to, to tell me all about his day. But the old words and gestures seemed somehow inadequate.

He gave me a quick, inquiring look over his shoulder. But when I said nothing more, he loped off down the corridor to the master bedroom where he now slept, calling,
See you in a bit
. In a few minutes, through the closed door, the cacophonous pounding of hard rock filled the house.

Dinesh had moved into the master bedroom a few days after the divorce papers were served. In a way, I’d been happy that he wanted to. I’d hoped it meant that he was beginning to accept the situation. The room had been lying empty, and it gave him a place to set up his musical equipment. At times I wonder, though, what he does in there when he’s not playing his CDs or practicing his electric guitar, when I don’t hear the rise and fall of his voice on the phone, the short, self-conscious laugh that means (I think) that a girl is at the other end. The nights when sleep eludes me, I sometimes stand in the passage and watch the thin strip of light that shows from under the door he always locks religiously behind him. I picture him lying awake on the big queen bed that used to belong to his father and me, and I want so badly to knock that my arm aches all the way from my fingertips to my shoulder.

I put the pizza in the oven and began rummaging for salad material in the refrigerator, where several plastic
wrapped vegetables displayed various stages of fungal growth. After a search, I managed to come up with a quarter of a tired-looking lettuce, some radishes shriveled to half their size, a passable cucumber, and a couple of tomatoes that slid around only a little inside their skins.

That wasn’t bad at all. Since Mahesh left, I hardly cook anymore, specially Indian food. I’ve decided that too much of my life has already been wasted mincing and simmering and grinding spices. I’m taking classes instead at the local college, not something fluffy like Quiltmaking or Fulfillment Through Transpersonal Communication but Library Science, which will (I hope) eventually get me a full-time job at the Sunnyvale Public Library where I now work afternoons.

The last two quarters I’ve been taking a fitness class as well. I’d like to believe this has nothing to do with Mahesh leaving. I enjoy the class. At first I’d been out of breath all the time, my body a mass of clumsy, aching muscles. But now I can do them all, the high kicks, the jumping jacks, the more elaborate routines. At night in bed I run my fingers with bitter satisfaction over the trim new fines of calf and thigh, my flat, hard stomach. A pleasant tiredness tingles in my palms, the soles of my feet. It helps me sleep, most nights. If sometimes I miss those hours in the kitchen, the late afternoon light lying golden and heavy over the aroma of garlic and fried mustard seed, I would never admit it to anyone.

I wonder if Dinesh, too, misses the curries and
dals
flavored with cumin and cilantro and green chilies, the
puris
and
parathas
rolled out and fried, puffing up golden brown. Nowadays he mostly eats at Burger King, where he has taken a job. Perhaps he just has more important things to miss. I don’t
know. We don’t talk that much since his father moved to San Francisco, to his new life in an apartment overlooking the Bay, where he lives with Jessica, his red-haired ex-secretary.

Recently when I think of Dinesh I have a sinking feeling inside me. I tell myself that I shouldn’t be too concerned about his clothing or hairstyle, or even the long hours when he shuts himself up in his room and listens to music that sounds furious. That they’re just signs of teenage growing pains made worse by his father’s absence. But sometimes I call his name and he looks up from whatever he’s doing—not with the irritated
what, Mom
, that I’m used to, but with a polite, closed stranger’s face. That’s when I’m struck by fear. I realize that Dinesh is drifting from me, swept along on the current of
his
new life which is limpid on the surface but with a dark undertow that I, standing helplessly on some left-behind shore, can only guess at. That’s when I fix salads, lots of salads, as though the cucumbers and celery and alfalfa could protect him from failing grades, drugs, street gangs, AIDS. As though the translucent rings of onions and the long curls of carrots could forge a chain that would hold him to me, close, safe forever.

When the phone rang, I didn’t bother to stop slicing. I knew Dinesh would pick it up. All the calls are for him anyway. But then I heard him open his door and yell, above the din of the stereo, “It’s for you, Mom.”

“Ask who it is,” I shouted back without interest. I’ve cut myself off from most of the friends of our married days. At first I tried attending a few affairs, dinners and
pujas
and graduation parties for children going on to Stanford or Harvard.
But I’d be the only woman in the room without a husband, and the other wives, even those too well bred to whisper, would look at me with pity, as though at something maimed, an animal with a limb chopped off. Behind the pity would be a flicker of gratitude that it hadn’t happened to
them
, or a gleam of suspicion because now I was unattached and therefore dangerous.

It’s probably another real estate agent, I said to myself as I started chopping the rusty edges off the lettuce, asking if we wanted to sell the house. They must subscribe to some kind of a divorce gazette, the way they’d descended on me in droves even before the legal settlements were complete, all of them speaking in exactly the same pinched-polite voice that makes me tense up even now. Those first couple of months, after the third or fourth call of the day, I’d be in tears. Remembering, I brought the knife down hard on the lettuce and watched with satisfaction as brown pieces flew out.

Eventually, of course, I will have to let the house go. The alimony payments from Mahesh are fair, and there’s my part-time job, but the money’s still not enough and every month I have to dip into my savings. “Why don’t you move to an apartment, Asha,” my supervisor keeps telling me. “It’d be a lot cheaper and you wouldn’t have to fight the memories.” She’s right. But Dinesh has lived in this house all his life. I feel that if I can hold on to it until he graduates, a year longer (eleven more payments, to be exact), I will have made up to him partly for my failure to hold on to his father. But perhaps once again I am mistaken in thinking that this matters to him.

“It’s someone called Marina-something. You going to pick it up or what?” Dinesh sounded irritated. He dislikes
anyone disturbing him when he’s listening to his music. “Says she’s calling from England.”

I didn’t know a Marina. I didn’t know anyone, in fact, who lived in England. But I hurried to the phone guiltily, the way I always do when I know it’s long distance.

“Asha!” The woman at the other end sounded tantalizingly familiar. She spoke with the clipped British accent of affluent Indians educated at convent schools run by foreign nuns. “It’s Mrinalini!” She paused, confident of being recognized.
Who
…
?
Then it struck me. How could I have not known, even for a moment, even though I hadn’t heard her voice in years? Because it was Mrinalini Ghose, who had been my classmate and best friend and confidante and competitor all through my growing-up years.

“Mrinal!” I whispered into the phone, and a mix of happiness and sorrow swept over me, making me dizzy. “How are you? What are you doing in England?” I spoke in Bengali, stumbling a little over the intimate
tui
I hadn’t used for so long. Were scenes flashing through her head, the way they were through mine? Our secret visits to the Maidan fair where we’d gorge ourselves on the fried onion
pakoras
that I could smell even now. All those nights I’d slept over at her house, in the big mahogany four-poster bed with the curved lion paws, both of us whispering and giggling for hours after the
ayah
turned the lights off. (About what? I couldn’t remember. It seemed unbelievable that once I’d stayed up half the night just to talk.) Every year before our final exams, we’d meet at her house—which was larger and quieter than mine—to study. We’d recite the names of the major rulers of the Mughal dynasty to each other, or list the metaphors in
Hamlet’s
To be or not to be
speech, while the cook brought up yet another pot of ginger tea which she had brewed specially for us because it was supposed to clear the brain. “I can’t read another line,” I’d tell her when I left. “I’m going to get a good night’s sleep.” But once home, I’d force myself to stay awake and study some more because I wanted so much to beat her. Most times, though, she ended up with the higher rank. Maybe she was just smarter. Or maybe she too stayed up and studied after I left.

She had been sent by her computer firm in Bombay, Mrinal said, to attend a technology transfer conference in London. She was coming to another one in San Francisco next week. That’s why she was calling.

“We’ve got to get together, Asha! I haven’t seen you in
ages
. I’m dying to meet Mahesh, too—the time I saw him at your wedding was so brief, it doesn’t really count. And your son—so handsome, just like his father. Of course, I’ve seen so many photos over the years I feel I know them already. …”

I closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against the cold white of the wall. The traditional Indian words of hospitality crowded my mouth.
It’ll be so wonderful to see you after all these years. You must stay with us, of course
. I knew they were what Mrinal expected. But I couldn’t say them.

The day my marriage had been arranged, halfway through my second year of college, I’d called Mrinal. I remembered it perfectly, a dim monsoon afternoon with gray-bellied clouds grazing the tops of the tall office buildings in the distance, and a salty, sulphur smell in the air, like lightning. Excited, I’d stumbled over the words as I told her how handsome my husband-to-be was, what a good job he had,
how I would be moving to California to live with film stars. Under the excitement had been a secret triumph that
I’d
been the one to be chosen first, that I, who everyone said wasn’t as pretty, was going to be married before Mrinal.