That’s our dream (mine more than his, I suspect)—moving out of this two-room apartment where it seems to me if we all breathed in at once, there would be no air left. Where I must cover my head with the edge of my Japan nylon sari (my expensive Indian ones are to be saved for special occasions—trips to the temple, Bengali New Year) and serve tea to the old women that come to visit Mother Sen, where like a good Indian wife I must never address my husband by his name. Where even in our bed we kiss guiltily, uneasily, listening for the giveaway creak of springs. Sometimes I laugh to myself, thinking how ironic it is that after all my fears about America, my life has turned out to be no different from Deepali’s or Radha’s. But at other times I feel caught in a world where everything is frozen in place, like a scene inside a glass paper-weight. It is a world so small that if I were to stretch out my arms, I would touch its cold unyielding edges. I stand inside this glass world, watching helplessly as America rushes by, wanting to scream. Then I’m ashamed. Mita, I tell myself, you’re growing westernized. Back home you’d never have felt this way.
We must be patient. I know that. Tactful, loving children. That is the Indian way. “I’m their life,” Somesh tells me as we lie beside each other, lazy from lovemaking. He’s not boasting, merely stating a fact. “They’ve always been there when I needed them. I could never abandon them at some old people’s home.” For a moment I feel rage. You’re constantly thinking of them, I want to scream. But what about me? Then I remember my own parents, Mother’s hands cool on my sweat-drenched body through nights of fever, Father teaching me to read, his finger moving along the crisp black angles of the alphabet, transforming them magically into things I knew, water, dog, mango tree. I beat back my unreasonable desire and nod agreement.
Somesh has bought me a cream blouse with a long brown skirt. They match beautifully, like the inside and outside of an almond. “For when you begin working,” he says. But first he wants me to start college. Get a degree, perhaps in teaching. I picture myself in front of a classroom of girls with blond pigtails and blue uniforms, like a scene out of an English movie I saw long ago in Calcutta. They raise their hands respectfully when I ask a question. “Do you really think I can?” I ask. “Of course,” he replies.
I am gratified he has such confidence in me. But I have another plan, a secret that I will divulge to him once we move. What I really want is to work in the store. I want to stand behind the counter in the cream-and-brown skirt set (color of earth, color of seeds) and ring up purchases. The register drawer will glide open. Confident, I will count out green dollars and silver quarters. Gleaming copper pennies. I will dust the jars of gilt-wrapped chocolates on the counter. Will straighten, on the far wall, posters of smiling young men raising their beer mugs to toast scantily clad redheads with huge spiky eyelashes. (I have never visited the store—my in-laws don’t consider it proper for a wife—but of course I know exactly what it looks like.) I will charm the customers with my smile, so that they will return again and again just to hear me telling them to have a nice day.
Meanwhile, I will the store to make money for us. Quickly. Because when we move, we’ll be paying for two households. But so far it hasn’t worked. They’re running at a loss, Somesh tells me. They had to let the hired help go. This means most nights Somesh has to take the graveyard shift (that horrible word, like a cold hand up my spine) because his partner refuses to.
“The bastard!” Somesh spat out once. “Just because he put in more money he thinks he can order me around. Ill show him!” I was frightened by the vicious twist of his mouth. Somehow I’d never imagined that he could be angry.
Often Somesh leaves as soon as he has dinner and doesn’t get back till after I’ve made morning tea for Father and Mother Sen. I lie mostly awake those nights, picturing masked intruders crouching in the shadowed back of the store, like I’ve seen on the police shows that Father Sen sometimes watches. But Somesh insists there’s nothing to worry about, they have bars on the windows and a burglar alarm. “And remember,” he says, “the extra cash will help us move out that much quicker.”
I’m wearing a nightie now, my very first one. It’s black and lacy, with a bit of a shine to it, and it glides over my hips to stop outrageously at mid-thigh. My mouth is an O of surprise in the mirror, my legs long and pale and sleek from the hair remover I asked Somesh to buy me last week. The legs of a movie star. Somesh laughs at the look on my face, then says, “You’re beautiful.” His voice starts a flutter low in my belly.
“Do you really think so,” I ask, mostly because I want to hear him say it again. No one has called me beautiful before. My father would have thought it inappropriate, my mother that it would make me vain.
Somesh draws me close. “Very beautiful,” he whispers. “The most beautiful woman in the whole world.” His eyes are not joking as they usually are. I want to turn off the light, but “Please,” he says, “I want to keep seeing your face.” His fingers are taking the pins from my hair, undoing my braids. The escaped strands fall on his face like dark rain. We have already decided where we will hide my new American clothes—the jeans and T-shirt camouflaged on a hanger among Somesh’s pants, the skirt set and nightie at the bottom of my suitcase, a sandalwood sachet tucked between them, waiting.
I stand in the middle of our empty bedroom, my hair still wet from the purification bath, my back to the stripped bed I can’t bear to look at. I hold in my hands the plain white sari I’m supposed to wear. I must hurry. Any minute now there’ll be a knock at the door. They are afraid to leave me alone too long, afraid I might do something to myself.
The sari, a thick voile that will bunch around the waist when worn, is borrowed. White. Widow’s color, color of endings. I try to tuck it into the top of the petticoat, but my fingers are numb, disobedient. It spills through them and there are waves and waves of white around my feet. I kick out in sudden rage, but the sari is too soft, it gives too easily. I grab up an edge, clamp down with my teeth and pull, feeling a fierce, bitter satisfaction when I hear it rip.
There’s a cut, still stinging, on the side of my right arm, halfway to the elbow. It is from the bangle-breaking ceremony. Old Mrs. Ghosh performed the ritual, since she’s a widow, too. She took my hands in hers and brought them down hard on the bedpost, so that the glass bangles I was wearing shattered and multicolored shards flew out in every direction. Some landed on the body that was on the bed, covered with a sheet. I can’t call it Somesh. He was gone already. She took an edge of the sheet and rubbed the red marriage mark off my forehead. She was crying. All the women in the room were crying except me. I watched them as though from the far end of a tunnel. Their flared nostrils, their red-veined eyes, the runnels of tears, salt-corrosive, down their cheeks.
It happened last night. He was at the store. “It isn’t too bad,” he would tell me on the days when he was in a good mood. “Not too many customers. I can put up my feet and watch MTV all night. I can sing along with Michael Jackson as loud as I want.” He had a good voice, Somesh. Sometimes he would sing softly at night, lying in bed, holding me. Hindi songs of love, Mere Sapnon Ki Rani, queen of my dreams. (He would not sing American songs at home out of respect for his parents, who thought they were decadent.) I would feel his warm breath on my hair as I fell asleep.
Someone came into the store last night. He took all the money, even the little rolls of pennies I had helped Somesh make up. Before he left he emptied the bullets from his gun into my husband’s chest.
“Only thing is,” Somesh would say about the night shifts, “I really miss you. I sit there and think of you asleep in bed. Do you know that when you sleep you make your hands into fists, like a baby? When we move out, will you come along some nights to keep me company?”
My in-laws are good people, kind. They made sure the body was covered before they let me into the room. When someone asked if my hair should be cut off, as they sometimes do with widows back home, they said no. They said I could stay at the apartment with Mrs. Ghosh if I didn’t want
to go to the crematorium. They asked Dr. Das to give me something to calm me down when I couldn’t stop shivering. They didn’t say, even once, as people would surely have in the village, that it was my bad luck that brought death to their son so soon after his marriage.
They will probably go back to India now. There’s nothing here for them anymore. They will want me to go with them. You’re like our daughter, they will say. Your home is with us, for as long as you want. For the rest of your life. The rest of my life. I can’t think about that yet. It makes me dizzy. Fragments are flying about my head, multicolored and piercing sharp like bits of bangle glass.
I want you to go to college. Choose a career. I stand in front of a classroom of smiling children who love me in my cream-and-brown American dress. A faceless parade straggles across my eyelids: all those customers at the store that I will never meet. The lace nightie, fragrant with sandalwood, waiting in its blackness inside my suitcase. The savings book where we have $3605.33. Four thousand and we can move out, maybe next month. The name of the panty hose I’d asked him to buy me for my birthday: sheer golden-beige. His lips, unexpectedly soft, woman-smooth. Elegant-necked wine bottles swept off shelves, shattering on the floor,
I know Somesh would not have tried to stop the gunman. I can picture his silhouette against the lighted Dewar’s sign, hands raised. He is trying to find the right expression to put on his face, calm, reassuring, reasonable. OK, take the money. No, I won’t call the police. His hands tremble just a little. His eyes darken with disbelief as his fingers touch his chest and come away wet.
I yanked away the cover. I had to see. Great America, a place where people go to have fun. My breath roller-coasting through my body, my unlived life gathering itself into a scream. I’d expected blood, a lot of blood, the deep red-black of it crusting his chest. But they must have cleaned him up at the hospital. He was dressed in his silk wedding kurta. Against its warm ivory his face appeared remote, stern. The musky aroma of his aftershave lotion that someone must have sprinkled on the body. It didn’t quite hide that other smell, thin, sour, metallic. The smell of death. The floor shifted under me, tilting like a wave.
I’m lying on the floor now, on the spilled white sari. I feel sleepy. Or perhaps it is some other feeling I don’t have a word for. The sari is seductive-soft, drawing me into its folds.
Sometimes, bathing at the lake, I would move away from my friends, their endless chatter. I’d swim toward the middle of the water with a lazy backstroke, gazing at the sky, its enormous blueness drawing me up until I felt weightless and dizzy. Once in a while there would be a plane, a small silver needle drawn through the clouds, in and out, until it disappeared. Sometimes the thought came to me, as I floated in the middle of the lake with the sun beating down on my closed eyelids, that it would be so easy to let go, to drop into the dim brown world of mud, of water weeds fine as hair.
Once I almost did it. I curled my body inward, tight as a fist, and felt it start to sink. The sun grew pale and shapeless; the water, suddenly cold, licked at the insides of my ears in welcome. But in the end I couldn’t.
They are knocking on the door now, calling my name. I push myself off the floor, my body almost too heavy to lift up, as when one climbs out after a long swim. I’m surprised at how vividly it comes to me, this memory I haven’t called up in years: the desperate flailing of arms and legs as I fought my way upward; the press of the water on me, heavy as terror; the wild animal trapped inside my chest, clawing at my lungs. The day returning to me as searing air, the way I drew it in, in, in, as though I would never have enough of it.
That’s when I know I cannot go back. I don’t know yet how I’ll manage, here in this new, dangerous land. I only know I must. Because all over India, at this very moment, widows in white saris are bowing their veiled heads, serving tea to in-laws. Doves with cut-off wings.
I am standing in front of the mirror now, gathering up the sari. I tuck in the ripped end so it lies next to my skin, my secret. I make myself think of the store, although it hurts. Inside the refrigerated unit, blue milk cartons neatly lined up by Somesh’s hands. The exotic smell of Hills Brothers coffee brewed black and strong, the glisten of sugar-glazed donuts nestled in tissue. The neon Budweiser emblem winking on and off like a risky invitation.
I straighten my shoulders and stand taller, take a deep breath. Air fills me—the same air that traveled through Somesh’s lungs a little while ago. The thought is like an unexpected, intimate gift. I tilt my chin, readying myself for the arguments of the coming weeks, the remonstrations. In the mirror a woman holds my gaze, her eyes apprehensive yet steady. She wears a blouse and skirt the color of almonds.
SILVER
PAVEMENTS,
GOLDEN ROOFS
I’VE LOOKED FORWARD TO THIS DAY FOR SO LONG THAT when I finally board the plane I can hardly breathe. In my hurry I bump into the air hostess who is at the door welcoming us, her brilliant pink smile an exact match for her brilliant pink nails.
“Sorry,” I say, “so very very sorry,” like the nuns had taught me to in those old, high-ceilinged classrooms cooled by the breeze from the convent neem trees. And I am. She is so blond, so American.
“No problem,” she replies, her smile as golden as the wavy hair that falls in perfect curls to her shoulder. I have never heard the expression before. No problem, I whisper to myself as I make my way down the aisle, in love with the exotic syllables. No problem. I finger my long hair, imprisoned in the customary tight braid that reaches below my waist. It feels coarse and oily. As soon as I get to Chicago, I promise myself, I will have it cut and styled.
The air inside the plane smells different from the air I’ve known all my life in Calcutta, moist and weighted with the smell of mango blossoms and bus fumes and human sweat. This air is dry and cool and leaves a slight metallic aftertaste on my lips. I lick at them, wanting to capture that taste, make it part of me forever.
The little tray of food is so pretty, so sanitary. The knife and fork sealed in their own plastic packet, the monogrammed paper napkin. I want to save even the shiny tinfoil that covers the steaming dish. I feel sadness for my friends—Prema, Vaswati, Sabitri—who will never see any of this. I picture them standing outside Ramu’s pakora stall, munching on the spicy batter-dipped onion rings that our parents have expressly forbidden us to eat, looking up for a moment, eyes squinched against the sun, at the tiny silver plane. I pick up the candy in its crackly pink wrap from the dessert dish. Almond Roca, I read, and run my fingers over its nubby surface. I slip it into my purse, then take it out, laughing at my silliness. I am going to the land of Almond Rocas, I remind myself. The American chocolate melts in my mouth, just as sweet as I thought it would be.
But then the worries come.
I hardly know Aunt Pratima, my mothers younger sister with whom I am to stay while I attend college. And her husband, whom I am to call Bikram-uncle—I don’t know him at all. They left India a week after their wedding (I was eight then) and have not been back since. Aunt is not much of a letter writer; every year at Bijoya she sends us a card stating how much she misses us, and that’s all. In response to my letter asking for permission to stay with her, she wrote back only, yes of course, but we live very simply.
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. All the women I know—my mother, her friends, my other aunts—are avid talkers, filling up lazy heat-hazed afternoons with long, gossipy tales while they drink tea and chew on betel leaves and laugh loud enough to scare away the ghu-ghu birds sleeping under the eaves. I couldn’t ask my mother—she’d been against my coming to America and would surely use that letter to strengthen her arsenal. So I told myself that was how Americans (Aunt Pratima had lived there long enough to qualify as one) expressed themselves. Economically. And that second part, about living simply—she was just being modest. We all knew that Bikram-uncle owned his own auto business.
Now I look down on the dazzle-bright clouds packed tight as snow cones, deceptively solid. (But I know they are
only mist and gauze, unable to save us should an engine fail and the plane plummet downward.) I pull my blue silk sari, which I bought specially for this trip, close around me. The air feels suddenly stale, heavy with other people’s exhalations. I think, What if Uncle and Aunt don’t like me? What if I don’t like them? I remember the only picture I’ve seen of them, the faded sepia marriage photo where they gazed into the camera, stoic and unsmiling, their heavy garlands pulling at their necks. (Why had they never sent any other pictures?) What if they hadn’t really wanted me to come and were only being polite? (Americans, I’d heard, liked their privacy. They liked their lives to be smooth and uninterrupted by the claims of relatives.) What if they’re not even at the airport? What if they’re there but I don’t recognize them? I imagine myself stranded, my suitcases strewn around me, the only one left in a large, echoing building after all the happily reunited families have gone home. Maybe I should have listened to Mother after all, I say to myself. Should have let her arrange that marriage for me with Aunt Sarita’s neighbor’s nephew. Saying it makes the fear something I can see and breathe, like the gray fog that hangs above the smoking section of the aircraft, where someone has placed me by mistake.
Later, of course, I will laugh at my foolishness. Aunt and Uncle are there, just as Aunt had promised, and I pick them out right away (how can I not?) from among the swirl of smart business suits and shiny leather briefcases, the elegant skirts that swing above stiletto-thin high heels.
Bikram-uncle is a short, stocky man dressed in greasy mechanic’s overalls that surprise me. He has a belligerent mustache and very dark skin and a scar that runs up the side of his neck. (Had it been hidden in the wedding photo under the garlands?) I am struck at once by how ugly he is—the garlands had hidden that as well—how unlike Aunt, who stoops a bit to match her husband’s height, her fine, nervous hands worrying the edge of her shawl as she scans the travelers emerging from Immigration.