The neckline of
Rekha’s blouse plunged to a deep U in the back. It not only plunged, but
fitting closely to her body, its mixed hue of green and gold glimmered
in the evening light. It shocked Arun Chakravarthy a little, to see her
skin exposed this way. He felt an urge to lift the material hanging from
her shoulder and drape it across her back. Not that he was a prude or
anything but he did not want anyone thinking his wife was too forward or
something. He was already seated and waiting in the car for her when
they had left home, but even if he had seen the blouse then, he would
have been hesitant to say anything to Rekha. This was because he was
unsure of what he could say, where he stood with her. God knows what
made him talk about Erika today, but one thing it was not, it had
nothing to do with scruples about honesty or anything like that. Maybe
he was just bragging, keep her a little off balance. Whatever it was he
did not now know how to deal with the rapid shifts and shapes things
were taking.
Rekha withdrew from the
back seat with the dish she had brought. It was covered with a glass
lid, the edges sealed with a masking tape, a couple of strips running
across it for good measure. She held it carefully away from her body as
she walked, the gravel crunching under her feet. Smug and safe, he
thought. His skin sprouted fresh sweat.
He pulled a hand-kerchief
and wiped his face, folded it and stuffed it back in his back
pocket.
"Give," he said extending
his hands.
Rekha walked past him and
ahead as if he had not spoken. Her green-gold sari rustled, the sari
border lifting in little waves over her heels. He continued to watch for
a while. In the muffled August air her heels on the pavement chirped at
him. For a single small moment Arun was tempted to turn around and get
back into the car and drive away.
He fell in step. Closely
parked cars lined the street as they walked up the little hill to the
Sinhas’ house. He recognized quite a few of them at the curb and this
made him uneasy, thinking how late they were. It was not just the
lateness of course but this whole business about this party for his new
bride that carved out a little hollow place in his stomach.
The front door was left
open. He held the storm-door for Rekha. As she passed him, the top of
her head was level with his chin. He caught the notes of the scent she
wore, and it reminded him of something, something else someone wore
maybe.
They both stood in the
air-conditioned hall. Evening gloom hung in the corners of the dark and
narrow corridor. The brightly lit kitchen at the end of the hall was a
mosaic of the brilliant fuschia, orange and yellow of saris. The smell
of fried poories, closely followed by layers of other flavors made him
hungry. A couple of women turned around to look at them from the
kitchen, one of them Asha. Her eyes took a quick swipe at Rekha’s face
and then she looked at him and smiled and nodded. What has Rekha told
her already? The muscles on his cheeks and mouth became rigid. So he
waved. He stood next to Rekha not sure if he should follow her to the
kitchen where she was about to take the dish.
Someone was loudly making a
point in the living room and then there was laughter. Arun ran a hand
over his brows.
"So! What excuse do you
have for being late now? Haanh?" Ravi Sinha emerged from the living
room, rolling up the sleeves of the white long cotton kurta he wore over
khaki pants, exposing thick, dark arms. He grinned and threw an arm over
Arun’s shoulder, his large face comforting, like an unmade bed on a cold
morning. Someone flipped a switch and the hall lit up with bright light.
Asha had come into the hall and the two women stood under the light, the
colors of their sarees illuminated.
"My fault, Ravi. Daddy
called from Bombay, just as we were leaving," Arun heard his wife lie
smoothly. "You know how it is. And then we had to call Ajay in San Jose
to give him the message" she said and allowed Ravi to take the dish from
her. Arun noticed Asha staring at Rekha’s hair. It had curled up close
around her neck now, as if the cutting had made it recoil in shock. She
had drawn the curls behind her ears, making her cheeks and chin look
naked.
Ravi’s hands extended
to receive the dish, like two shovels. Arun watched his wife, walking
beside his friend, her face upturned in profile. She seemed unfamiliar
in this hall. Ravi leaned slightly towards her, inclining his head to
listen, and then the two of them walked into the brightness of the
kitchen and disappeared behind the wall. He heard squeals of greetings -
your hair! you cut your hair! - and response from a place that he could
not see.
"Arun, come in, can I get
you something to drink?"
Asha smiled, her eyes
shining. He looked at her and thought about how much she hated him. He
knew this, that she hated him, because several times in the past Asha
had talked of men who have American girl-friends and then go home to
marry an Indian bride. She believed, she had told him this, she believed
such men should be shot.
He looked across a ruby-red
Bhokari rug and into the brightly-lit living room which contained two
large sofas, a chair and an ottoman, all covered in white. Chairs from
the dining room were arranged around the periphery of the room for extra
seating. On the coffee table were little paper plates with half eaten
samosas, smeared with green chutney. The lamps on the sides of the sofa
were made of brass pots topped with black shades. He remembered the pots
just like these that his grandmother used to heat water for the bath.
Splotches of color from the brocade pillows interlaced with white and
pastel sport shirts and the tan and brown mostly male faces.
"Go to hell, " Rekha had
said. Go to hell. Go to hell? Indian women talk this way?
"Hey Arun! So Rekha’s visa
came through! Congratulations! The Mehtas' son-in-law is still waiting.
Six months and he’s still waiting."
He grinned and nodded and
murmured something. He did not want to put on a new face, not just yet
and so he acted like he was heading towards someone.
He found a spot on a single
sofa next to a window. Across the darkness the houses had come alive.
Globes of lights bloomed on the yards. He looked down at the clear cubes
floating in amber liquid in the glass someone had thrust in his hands.
He did not remember asking for it but he must have. He took a sip. It
felt good going down a thirsty tongue, the tiny bubbles exploding in the
back of the mouth, wetting it. A long thin line, a scratch, ran from the
base of his thumb, to the wrist. It was not fresh, the slim welt had
subsided now and the skin was flat like nothing had happened. It was now
covered with a hairline scab. If he peeled it would bleed in tiny beads.
He ran a finger over it feeling the bumpy scratchy texture and when he
slightly pressed it, there was a blunt pain from somewhere under the
layers of skin. She had held his hands away when she pushed him out of
the bathroom. Her hair, what was left of it, was wet and clung to her
head in ringlets. The rest of it was on the white tiled floor, the
orange handles of the scissors on top. There was something obscene about
the way they laid on the floor, in long black swatches, like rags. In
the bright lights from the bathroom ceiling, her face was swollen and
red. It had frightened him, he had not expected this kind of a reaction,
although he was not sure what he had expected.
He got up and moved to the
table thinking he’d fill his glass. The table was actually laden with a
buffet. Everything he loved.
"Here Arun, come on." Asha
handed him a plate, flashed him a smile, her lips drawn thin across her
mouth. He clutched it, the Styrofoam plate squeaking in his hand. He
looked at the potatoes, glistening in turmeric oil, green methi leaves
clinging to it. Next to it was a tray of whole-wheat puris ready to fold
the potatoes in.
"Aloo-Methi?"
He felt Asha’s eyes on his
cheeks. He rubbed his cheek. He never understood, well may be did and
did not, what exactly bothered Asha about Erika, but she drove her
disapproval directly at him like a missile. What was it, the white skin?
That she was alien to the culture? He guessed, somewhat by instinct,
that it was not any of that but something else and maybe all of it too,
all rolled into a maddening accusation of selling out. What the heck,
who was she to judge?. He had then stopped coming.
He looked at her now. She
had a pleasant face even if shapeless, her long dark hair tied in some
sort of a knot at the nape. Her eyes under sleepy looking lids and
perched above a long prominent nose always watched, as if she knew. Just
knew what has been left out: the real price of the remodeled kitchen,
the reason why the Pandya kid did not come home for Thanksgiving break.
Why Arun’s looking like a jackass right now. Arun tasted loathing like
grit in the back of his mouth.
"A little later Asha, I‘ll
wait a little bit."
"Ohh really, not hungry? I
know. I can’t eat either when it’s so hot like this," Asha gurgled. Her
forehead and nose were shiny. "Rekha looks cute with her hair that way,
well, anything will look good on her."
He nodded.
"Did you cut
it?"
Blood pumped in his ears
and he was blinded for an instant, as if caught in a sudden glare. He
kept his eyes on the dish of potatoes, glistening in turmeric oil under
the brilliant light from above, the flecks of mustard seeds here and
there.
"What?".
Asha looked at him without
the smile.
"I said do you like
it?"
He turned and walked into
the kitchen. He walked into men and women, laughing and teasing, walked
in to greetings with that touch of familiarity that would be out of
place in another crowd, in another place. He didn’t know if he had
missed it and maybe it was not that that he missed it but had forgotten
something about it. Often he had tried to put a distance between himself
and this unbidden stepping into his personal space. It had to do with
being with Erika, of course he knew that, but was it her, or him, or
them? Is this what she sensed and why she said he was too
needy?
Stainless steel
stockpots sat on counter tops, on top of burners, their sides smeared
with greasy fingerprints. Spilled curry had dried to a bright yellow.
And then he saw Rekha at the counter, arranging poories on a
platter.
Her back was turned to him,
her hair stopping at her neckline. Two half-moon shaped scars were
visible right below that, traces of childhood chicken pox, possibly.
Thinking of her as a little girl with chicken pox made him feel he did
not know her at all although it seemed before that he always had.
He placed his plate on the
counter and Rekha turned and watched him over someone’s silk covered
shoulder.
"Aren’t you
eating?"
Her voice floated towards
him over the noisy kitchen. It soothed him in a strange way. Perhaps it
was the husky quality of its tone, which had surprised him when he had
first met her, or perhaps the sheer blandness in the question. It made
him want to say things to her. He was certain if he opened his mouth
there would be no sound.
"Ravi was looking for you,"
she said.
"Yeah. I’ll see
him."
She looked at his face and
then looked away as someone started talking to her.
He cleared his
throat.
"Rekha! Are you getting it,
the poories are going fast!" Asha rushed in.
Rekha picked up the tray of
poories and followed Asha into the dining room. He stood for a few
moments unable to move, looking at the spot where she had stood. The
space vanished quickly as someone else moved in to his vision. He walked
around the kitchen counter toward the back door. He held on to the tone,
for just a little while longer, that tone he thought he had heard in her
voice.
The hot air trapped in the
porch hit him like a body blow. He quickly opened the screen door to the
deck and stepped out into the night. The door creaked and snapped shut
behind him.
The baked timber of the
deck was warm. He took a deep breath but the warm air did not fill his
lungs. The night had settled into dark shapes, lightly around the bushes
and densely packed around the conical shapes of the tall evergreens,
fragrant with summer smells. He walked, the grass compressing with no
resistance under his feet, into the humid darkness, grateful for the
mindless din of the night insects.
Sounds of laughter rose
from inside. The windows hung like pictures suspended in the blackness.
Luminescent, revealing many familiar face and many he did not know,
their lips moving, smiling, without sound. The light from the windows
fell at angles on the grass and he stood outside of the lighted area.
The walls were washed ochre by the lamp light. Even as a boy, sitting in
the alternating shadow and light of the passing lampposts as the car
whizzed by, he liked watching those windows that revealed lighted rooms,
a chair at an angle, books on shelves, someone’s face. The windows of
his childhood did not have glass panes. They were covered by a grill,
often simple vertical ones, sometimes in fancy curls and whorls. The
doors were never shut. Warm air flowed in carrying the smells from the
ocean and the streets below, laden with mist in the monsoon. And through
those windows, the house’s sounds and smells, voices and radio music
flowed out. Often he was lulled to sleep in the dark corner of the car,
watching the windows pass by.
The porch door creaked and
then the door to the terrace. Ravi’s shirt gleamed white in the night
light. He hooded his eyes with his hand and peered into the dark,
holding the door open..
"Hey Arun!
Arun?"
"Hi."
"Arun, what’s the
matter, are you OK?"
No, he wanted to tell his
friend, nothing is OK yaar.
"Fine. I’m fine. Just
needed some air, that’s all. Go on in Ravi, I’ll be in soon"
Ravi stood where he
was, holding on to the door. Then he let go and the door snapped shut.
Picking up two plastic chairs from the deck he walked over to where Arun
stood. He plunked them down, separated them, threw himself on one,
filling the chair. He pointed Arun to the other .
"It is hot as hell here.
What’re you doing, eating air?" he asked running his sleeve over his
forehead. "Or is it eating you?"
He was grateful for Ravi’s
company but did not want him to know that. He stopped, dropped his head
back on his shoulder and rolled, left to right. The moon broke clear of
the clouds for a moment and then was engulfed again.
"I ran into Erika in
Seattle, last month. She called."
Ravi sat still.
"I miss her Ravi. When she
left, I thought I’ll never see her again, I wanted to never see her
again." When he showed up in the middle of the afternoon at their house,
Asha had let him in and then immediately called Ravi to come home from
work. They waited in her kitchen sipping the tea she made and which he
could not taste, nor could he understand any of the words she
spoke.
Ravi clasped his hands over
his head, and leaned back on the chair. His gold watch glinted.
Arun wished he would say
something, but knew he would not want to hear it.
"Rekha is a very nice girl.
Smart, pretty. This is the time to think? Now? Don’t try so hard to fuck
up what you have."
"Thanks. I needed
that."
"What do you want from me?
You got dumped Arun, but good. Forget about it."
Forget it. Forget it.
Marriage heals everything, his mother had said. Just pick a nice girl,
any girl. When she handed him the manila folder containing photographs
and letters he felt so ashamed, insulted and angry. "What, you put it on
the billboard in Parry’s Corner?" he had asked, "my son needs a wife?".
It works, she had answered,
one way to find a wife when you have only three weeks of
vacation.
"What’s with the hair,
anyhow?" Ravi’s voice sounded loud.
The hair. He now
remembered, standing on the grass, looking at his friend who was waiting
for a response, trying to collect the words to answer him, that her hair
that night had reminded him of sandalwood oil and the roses she had worn
in her hair on their wedding reception. His body shivered slightly.
Arun slowly lowered himself
into the chair, placed his hands on the armrest, and when his back
rested on the chair, allowed his muscles to relax. He sat quietly. He
observed the heaviness in his chest that comes from the two most awful
feelings - guilt and regret.
"Ravi, do you know if Asha
loves you?"
Ravi did not answer. Arun
felt a little foolish, afraid he might have overstepped a
boundary.
Ravi dug into the pocket of
his kurta and took out a cigarette pack. "I was, what twenty-five, yeah
twenty-five when we were married. I had to leave her behind in Agra for
six months after that, when I came here. And then she joined me. Does
she love me? To tell you the truth, I don’t know. I don’t even know if
what I feel for her is what you call as love."
"You know."
"I don’t know. I don’t," he
waved his cigarette around. "I just feel married, it feels like . .
.well like married, like life."
"With Erika, I.... I
thought...."
"Like in the
movies."
"Not like the movies.
C’mon."
Ravi laughed a little
awkwardly and then became still. Arun took a cigarette from
him.
"It has never occurred to
me to ask, you know? Is this love, is this not love? If this is love,
then I don’t know when it happened," Ravi said.
They smoked
quietly.
"But I can tell you one
thing," Ravi leaned forward, "I know if she wanted to leave me tomorrow,
for whatever reason, whatever reason, no amount of my loving her is
going to stop her, I don’t think. And you know what? I don’t know the
name for what makes her stay either."
This is how his
parents lived; his sisters, in marriages to men chosen for them. Love
seemed, not just irrelevant, but something trivial, even vulgar. It
should not be so hard, Erika had said, in the gray light of a wintry
afternoon, running a pink nail along his cheek, her blues eyes like fine
marbles, it should not be so hard to love, Arun. Thinking of that filled
him with despair.
"Yeah," he said. "Yes, I
know."
"You don’t know, you
don’t," Ravi said, laughing at him. "You think you do, but you don’t. I
don’t. I don’t know what this is all about. Oh leave it yaar, just get
on with it. After ten, fifteen years it hardly matters, one gets used to
things. All this love-shove, other things take over, and you don’t even
think about it. "
"Hmmm." When you have never
been in love, when you have never felt that tightness in your gut, how
would you know what you have not missed? And one look at Asha, who can
think of love after that, you poor bastard.
"Well it’s not forever like
chasing girls in college you know. Then of course you whistle at them,
follow them around and all that and even think this special girl means
something to you, even get all heartachey about this love and all that,
but in the back of your mind, you know, you always know, this marriage
thing is something different. And that’s just the way it is."
His voice softened when he
asked, "What’s going on between you two?"
Arun leaned back and drew
long on his cigarette. He cleared his throat. "Rekha has asked that I
leave for a little while."
When Rekha had emerged from
the bathroom, she had combed and pulled her hair into a rubber band, and
it laid smooth and glossy from the dampness. Now it had lost that
obscenity that he saw in the chopped off hair earlier. Tame. The
forehead beneath the hairline shone. She had lined her eyes with fresh
kohl. She kept the kohl in a small silver box on a shelf in the bathroom
and many times he had seen her lean into the mirror and apply the dark
stain to the rims of her eyes, the little finger crooked. It transformed
her, all of her, when she rimmed her eyes that way. "Leave," she had
said, her expression offering no clues except for the eyes, which were
brilliant . "Go. Go to her, if that’s what you want. Just... just go.
Go. I can take care of myself."
He had looked at her
dumbly. And then she had started cooking the dish to take for the party.
"What do you mean, leave?"
Ravi asked.
"I told her about Erika. She asked."
"Erika? What does Erika got
to do with ...You’ve been seeing Erika? Your brain’s on a holiday?" Ravi
said in rapid-fire Hindi.
"I’m not seeing her, of
course not! But I told her I’m not over it yet... I’m not. . .I don’t
know. I don’t know. I asked for time to sort this out."
"You asked for time?" Ravi
laughed, with no mirth, exploding the quiet night. "And then
what?"
And then what? He held his
arms tighter across his chest as though holding something in. The
tied-back drapery revealed the insides of the windows in reversed
hourglass shapes. Ravi’s words flowed around him. Dinner was over and
people were moving away into the living room, the room becoming bare but
for the furniture. There were no more faces, just the corner of the
table and a chair at an angle. A part of a painting was visible above
the buffet. Someone moved around inside. And then he saw a patch of her
green sari, and then her elbow. She turned and moved closer toward the
window, facing him now, peering into the dark. He looked at her, the
round face against the glass pane, the short hair forming a new profile.
He believed that he could feel the barest hint of tenderness, fragile
and fluid, inside of him. Although he knew she could not see him, he
believed, also, that she was looking for him.
