As Sweet as Honey (16 page)

First was the official engagement party. The next day would be the wedding, beginning at seven a.m. That evening, after we had stuffed ourselves with sweets, we sought out Nalani. She looked so small. Yesterday, she had henna applied to her feet by Auntie Shobana, who was born in Lahore and relocated to Madhupur. The designs she drew were intricate, spirals and flowers, which she also applied to Nalani’s hands. We had been shy around Nalani in her engagement sari and all the gold jewelry and flowers, but now she wore a simple blue chiffon sari. Tomorrow her hair would be transformed into an elaborate style with jasmine flowers and tassels, but now she wore it in a simple braid. Again, I was overcome with a sadness I did not understand.

Rasi was curious about the wedding night, but Nalani batted away her questions. She lay full length on her bed and stared at the ceiling. We lay beside her. We used to lie like this on our roof, looking at the stars. Nalani had once told us that each of us was born under a special star that connected us to our ancestors, that heritage was never something to throw away. Now she told us when it came time for us to marry, our parents would choose wisely, that they would match family, education, outlook as well as stars. I didn’t tell her I was going to live alone.

“Rajan?” I asked.

“Will always remain my fond classmate,” she replied.

If she doubted herself, she hid it well. I wondered if it really was for the best she was not marrying Rajan. I had read enough Mills & Boons to know that the road to true love was a rocky one. Maybe they would have had a lovely wedding, but so much could happen afterwards. Rajan might have died like Uncle Archer. Maybe the horoscopes were right, and the stars knew more than we did. I remembered Aunt Meterling asking me if I understood why Nalani could not marry Rajan.

“It has to do with his family not wanting her in the house during her monthlies.”

Aunt Meterling looked at me.

“Beti, it was because his parents wanted a rich bride, and Nalani is poor, but worse, an orphan.”

“She’s an orphan?”

“Yes, that what the word means. No mother or father, and some people are very particular about family.”

I didn’t tell my aunt that I thought you couldn’t become an orphan; you just were one, like being poor, or short. I realized I hadn’t really thought it through and felt embarrassed.

“She’s better off with Ajay,” said my aunt. “Imagine having to live with the kind of family Rajan must have.”

Maybe Aunt Meterling was right; maybe Nalani was truly at peace, as her paper fortunes predicted, trusting in the future she and Ajay would have. She would become a doctor, and both she and Ajay would have jobs in the U.S. I thought of how many different ways stories are told, how many lies and truths. I resolved to tell the truth, no matter what. I felt fairly proud about that.

Nalani rolled over onto her side, and looked at me.

“You must marry when the time comes, Mina. It is your duty,” she said.

Rasi smirked, but I felt as if my destiny had been written then and there, only it troubled me.

“Of course I will,” I said.

At five a.m., Nalani bathed, and dressed in the first wedding sari, as centuries of women had done before her. We made our way to the marriage hall, in our silk and flowers and jewelry. The hall was completely decorated with flowers, as the priests tended the fire. Nalani looked like a princess, but also a stranger, with her makeup and jewelry. Ajay arrived with a fan and ceremoniously pretended he wanted to live the life of a brahmachari, and Uncle Darshan interceded with him, saying that married life as a householder would be equally fulfilling. Ritual after ritual was performed. For some reason Rasi dug her nails into my hand, and I could tell she was crying a bit. Nalani and Ajay exchanged heavy garlands of flowers as they were raised up in the crowd. Then the muhurtham, when Ajay tied the marriage thali around Nalani’s neck as we threw handfuls of rose petals, and the drums and horns played loudly. Done! Nalani was married.

Nalani was to spend the night at Ajay’s home, where his mother and father presented her with another sari. Their neighbors visited, and we came over for a big dinner. I had eaten so many sweets and snacks by this time that I eyed what was on my plate with trepidation, but I dutifully held out my hand for the wedding payasam and then the wedding ladoo. Meterling leaned her head on Simon’s head, then laughed as he attempted to scoop the rice and rasam with his hand. There had been banana leaves provided for the lunch, but Simon was served on a plate then, too. Always, he was asked if he wanted a spoon, and always, he shook his head no. Finally, half-asleep, my
uncles singing
filmi
songs, my aunties looking tired and happy, we wandered home. The stars were bright in the sky, and I looked for constellations. Behind us, the house was quiet, just Nalani and Ajay and his parents, maybe some cousins, too. How good it must have felt to Nalani to finally unwrap herself, and slip into her nightgown. And if it was Ajay’s presence that awaited her, maybe that was good, because together, they could sleep, exhausted, and married.

PART TWO
Time Passes

But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. Winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken …

—To the Lighthouse

28

S
he had dreamed of him again. Sitting jackknifed on the new bed she shared with Uncle Simon, her heart racing, my aunt Meterling woke with panic. For seven consecutive days, she had dreamed of her Archer dying in seven different ways. In her first nightmare, she pushed him over slippery rocks in water; in the second, he walked backward off a cliff. He clutched his heart only once, falling to his knees, wearing a yellow tuxedo; that was dream number six. In dreams four and five, he was shot by an assassin and stabbed by a knife. Only in the first was she directly responsible for his death, although in all, she was implicated. In this seventh, the latest, her hands slipped from his as he tumbled off the Middle Tower of the Tower of London.

All she told me years later was that she had nightmares; as always with my aunt, I embellish the stories. I was not there. Had I been there, I tell myself, maybe I could have prevented them, and though I had desperately begged at the time, the idea of sending an eleven-year-old to a foreign country while her own parents already lived in another one, and her extended family lived on Pi, was dismissed.

“I could be an opera girl!”

“What’s an opera girl?” asked Sanjay.

“An ayah.”

“You have to be old to be an ayah.”

That was true. One of Mary Angel’s cousins had an ayah
because her mother worked, and that cousin was much older than me.

“But you don’t have to be old to be an opera girl!”

We knew of an American family that wanted to hire opera girls from Madhupur; they would pay for room and board in exchange for looking after children. Grandmother wrinkled her nose at the idea, and said these girls, whom she called O-pairs, would have no rights, and on top, would pine away. She used the Tamil phrase for “pine away,” but in English it sounded awful, like living in a tree without company or food.

I complained loudly, but I did not go to England with Aunt Meterling, and she continued to have nightmares. She told me how those first months had been when I was older, but I imagined what she chose not to tell. Isn’t that who we are at heart, a species that tells and doesn’t tell, keeps the heart and brain hidden, complicating our lives for the drama, so we don’t have to face the night?

In the mornings, my aunt read the newspaper with utter concentration while Uncle Simon played with the baby. A woman aged a hundred and one had died. My aunt had lately grown fascinated with obituaries. The newspaper reported it with a caption under a photo of the woman celebrating her last birthday, her mouth beaming, a paper hat on her head, with balloons and cake nearby, and a column describing her life. Does the life ahead seem longer when you are elderly? Or does it merely seem a continuation of what you know? If one were to sit and examine each decade, count the measure of one’s life, maybe it would seem long. “Every day, you know,” said the
centenarian-plus to the reporter, “I wake up surprised I made it another day.”

The woman had been married to the same man for sixty-seven years. She had seven children, beginning in 1909, nearly all of whom were still living, plus sixteen grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Meterling stared at the paper. Only a year ago, she, Meterling, was twenty-eight, pregnant and getting married. Now, she was a widow, wife, and mother. She looked out the window. There beyond the garden view was more of the English world, more dazzle, more drizzle, and black bare limbs trembling with raindrops. It was beautiful and it was England, and she, my aunt Meterling, was here. Despite the state of the world, despite the bombings near Underground stations, despite the unworldly ferocity of soccer fans, despite the fear of unexpected public violence—here was my aunt, in an England she still considered beautiful, new, and full of possibilities. But where were the sketch pads and easels, where was the travel that was to have lit her days, as Archer had promised her a year ago? They hadn’t known about Oscar, of course, they had merely planned around what they knew; but would she be as happy? I was convinced of my aunt’s ability for survival, provided she was looked after. As for the dreams of travel, they grew in me, like a seed sprouting in the stomach of a sage to turn into a tree as he meditates.

From the first, she liked the flat. She liked the cozy kitchen, with the clean-swept floor and a picture of a rooster on one of the walls. Because she had seen the photographs, she had not expected to be surprised, but she was, opening and closing the doors and looking out the windows, sitting on the plump gray couch the landlord had provided. It was semi-furnished, but she did not see any need for more furniture; freshly painted, it had an air of beginnings, new starts. It was so different from
island homes, from
her
home. No dark, heavy colonial furniture or mirrorwork hangings, no twenty-five foot ceilings with metal fans, no wooden swing. It felt like the twentieth century, not the nineteenth. Spacious, bright,
and
, thankfully enough, she
fit
. Younger, she told me, she used to think of herself like Alice, who drank the bottle that made her arms and legs and head thrust out of the Wonderland house she was in.

She had seen so many illustrations of English homes, cottages with teapots and chintz, but the flat was streamlined, with a wall painted a light brown in the living room. Ceiling moldings from the Regency townhouse the flat was ensconced in remained to add character, as did the thick doors that led to the bedroom and to the garden. The kitchen opened onto the living room, and the bathroom, painted light blue, was off to one side. Because it was tucked under the main townhouse, it felt protected from the street it fronted. Cutting flowers from the fairy rosebush, which would brave on for another month, she could see people hurry past on their way to work. There was a bakery around the corner, and the sweet fragrance of buns and scones drifted delightfully, wending its way past an old plane tree whose mottled bark Meterling first mistook for disease.

The first day there, she drew out from the suitcase her Ganesha, carefully wrapped by Grandmother in an old sari, and a small silver Lakshmi and infant Krishna. She had told Simon that she needed to travel with her faith, to set up her shrine and not lose her connection to Pi. There was a bookcase in the kitchen, and there, she arranged the small statues. Grandmother had also packed her a silver diya lamp, and had even rolled some cotton wicks for it. They had landed at Gatwick on October 6th. From the plane, looking out the window, she was surprised to see how green England was. The grass seemed
springy, freshly cut, verdant like spring. Where was Keats’s season of mist and mellow fruitfulness? She longed to see the apple trees as much as she longed to see snow.

Through customs and the taxi ride, Meterling held Oscar, and leaned into Simon. He narrated what they were looking at, but the words flew past her. She looked at the view, seeing Austen, seeing Dickens, seeing Eliot. It was only when they had stopped in a store to purchase milk, butter, coffee, and other sundries, that she spoke.

“Oil, Simon—we need oil for the lamp.”

At the flat, lighting the oil lamp, bowing her head, her palms pressed together, she prayed like Grandmother would for good fortune in these new beginnings. Then she put a small pot of milk on the boil, let it nearly boil over, and prayed for an abundant new start to their new life, an overflow of fortune. Simon made coffee, and they used the now-sacred milk to lighten it. Meterling gave a few drops of the cooled milk to Oscar as well. Their new lives in their new flat had begun.