“Yes,” she says distantly, then goes into her room. When, dressed in my new clothes, I knock to say that I’m leaving, she doesn’t answer. I stand in front of the shut bedroom door, guilty as a teenager. I know I should turn the knob, go inside. But I don’t. Right now I need to feel confident. And I know Radhika would disapprove of the lacy white dress which stops at my thighs, the stiletto heels in which I stumble a little, the glittery crimson outlining my mouth. My flyaway hair from which I’ve shampooed all traces of the jabakusum oil she rubbed in with such care.
WHEN AJIT SEES me, he lets out a long whistle. “I’d planned a quiet dinner.” He laughs. “But now I see we’ve got to go dancing.”
So that’s what we do. And even though I’ve never danced in my life, in the dimly lit nightclub where music ricochets off every glistening surface, and swaying bodies brush against us unselfconsciously, I find that I can do it. I shimmy my shoulders and throw back my head, dancing my way into the new life I’d begun to dream—it seems so long ago—on the Greyhound bus. When Ajit spins me so I end up against his chest, I don’t shove away as an earlier Mira would have done, the Mira on whose hair rust flecks from a water tank had settled like dried blood. I lean there a moment, savoring the wholesome, lemony smell of his skin. When after a walk along the riverfront with its glimmering waters, he kisses me, I find it pleasant, and not the disgusting, spit-and-groping occurrence I’d feared. And when, somewhat timidly, he asks if I would come to his apartment, I am not outraged or even embarrassed. I lay my fingers lightly on his lips, as a woman in a movie might do, a dangerous woman, and say, with a smile, “Not yet.”
IT’S AFTER MIDNIGHT when I open the door of our apartment. Inside, all is silent. Dark. I slip off my heels, tiptoe toward my room.
“Mira, do you know how late it is! I was so worried!” Radhika’s voice is a whip, lashing out of blackness. When she flicks on the light, it blinds me.
She’s still wearing the batik robe. It’s wrinkled now, and her hair, come undone, is mussed as though she’s been running her hands through it.
“I’m sorry—”
Now she notices my dress, the high heels I’m holding. “Where did you go?” she asks hoarsely. “With whom?”
My cheeks are hot, but I lift my chin. “I went dancing—with my friend Ajit.”
“Dancing! With your friend Ajit!” Her voice is thick. She takes a step toward me. “Look at you—out all night with some man, half-naked in that dress—” Her eyes take in my hair, my makeup, stop on my mouth, kissed bare of lipstick and a little swollen. “Like . . . like a common—”
“Like what?” I’m angry too, now. What gives her the right to talk to me this way? “Like you?”
Her eyes widen in shock. For a moment she’s silent. Then she says, very quietly, “Not like me, Mira. I’d never want you to be like me. To make my mistakes. To end up tied to the man who tricked you in the worst way, because what else is possible in your life—”
There’s something heavy in her voice, about to break open. To forestall it, I shout, “Stop trying to be my mother.”
“Your mother!” Radhika makes a small sound in her throat that could be a laugh. “I don’t want to be your mother. I only want to save you from the suffering I see you rushing toward.” She puts her hands on my shoulders. “If I could take all the pain from your life into mine, I’d do it right now. Mira, my dear.” She pushes away a wisp of hair from my face, kisses my cheek. “My love,” she says. Then her lips are on mine.
For a moment or a lifetime, I stand stunned, surprised and yet not so, trying to make sense of what’s happening. Trying to make sense of my body, the shivering that rises up from the soles of my feet. Do my lips want to kiss her back? Do my treacherous arms want to crush her softness against mine? Then I thrust her away.
“No,” I whisper. “No.” My voice shakes with horror. But who am I horrified by? My shoes have clattered to the floor. As I stumble to the apartment door, I hear Radhika cry, “Mira, don’t go—” Then I slam it shut.
I STAND ON the curb outside our building, shivering. When numbness has seeped into all the bones of my bare feet, I call Ajit from the pay phone. I am not sure what I will do if Radhika comes looking for me. When she doesn’t, I’m not sure if it’s thankfulness I feel.
The choices in our lives, what impels us to them?
A few late-night folks pass by. I cringe back against the wall, but they don’t seem to notice me. Perhaps an Indian girl, barefoot in a gauzy white mini, is a common sight to them. Perhaps they have worse problems of their own.
Ajit’s car takes the corner too sharply, screeches to a stop.
“Mira, what happened?”
Dressed in sweats and sleep-tousled, he seems startled and young. Too young, I think tiredly.
“God, you’re freezing,” he says as he shepherds me into the car. He pulls off his windbreaker and guides my arms through its sleeves. In his apartment, while I sit on the couch and stare at the wall, he brings me a pair of woolen socks. When I begin to cry, he puts an awkward arm around me, not sure of what to do.
Inside I am split in two. One Mira watches the other crying, tries to figure out why. Is it Ajit’s kindness? Or the loss of the only friendship in my life? Are they for a mother who believed she must keep her daughter safe at any cost, these belated tears? Or for myself, being sucked into a vortex from which whispered words rise like ancestral ghosts: disgusting, perverted, unnatural.
I turn to Ajit, pull his face to mine, press my lips on his. When he says he doesn’t think it’s a good idea, I’m too upset right now, I hold him tighter. I will the pounding in my head to grow louder, to drown my thoughts. I rake my nails across Ajit’s back and hear him gasp. I tug off his sweatshirt and kiss whatever I come across—earlobe, throat, the curved line of his collarbone. He no longer protests. Against my mouth, his skin is salt and smoke. My head is exploding. Briefly, before the pounding pulls me under, I wonder if a woman’s skin would have tasted different.
THERE IS, IN empty apartments, a certain shifting of energy, an absence of breathed air. I feel this as soon as I open the door to Radhika’s place. But I am too exhausted to wonder where she is at 3:00 A.M. Or where I will go when I leave this place, as I know I must.
I stumble to the bathroom and start the water. I kick off the too-large men’s sandals that Ajit had insisted on giving me, shrug off his jacket. I’ll leave them for him at the restaurant. My own clothes—the lace dress ripped carelessly under the arm, the panties stained with blood, I throw into the wastebasket. My aim is shaky. The basket tips over, spilling crumpled wads of paper over the bathroom floor.
Sex had been a disappointment. I hadn’t expected pleasure, but I had hoped for ecstasy—in the way the Greeks had meant the word. Something that took you out of yourself, made you forget who you were.
In Ajit’s bed, no matter what I attempted, I remained myself, caught in my unresponsive flesh like the seed inside a hard, green mango. When finally he took my face in his hands and said, trying to mask his disappointment, “It’s okay, Mira, stop now. We’ll try again another day,” I closed my eyes, shamed by his generosity. I knew there wouldn’t be another day.
The water sends a welcome shock of heat through me as I climb in. I should be soaping myself clean, but I’m too tired. I lie there and watch the ripples of reflected light on white porcelain, on wet brown skin. In the stillness, it is easy to drift into other waters. Orange peels floating down, humid air that clogs the throat. When the knocking begins, I have to put a hand over my mouth to stifle my scream.
But it is only one of the downstairs girls. “Sorry to disturb you so early,” she says. “But I heard the water running, so I knew you were up. Do you know Radhika’s in the hospital?” She nods to confirm the question in my eyes. “Yes, another suicide attempt. Late last night, in Malik-ji’s apartment. She took his sleeping pills this time. Luckily they found her before it was too late. Listen, you better sit down, you don’t look so good. . . .”
r /> * * *
THE WAITING ROOM of the hospital is unbearably cheery with pastel printed sofas and posters of baby animals peering from behind unlikely objects. I sit on a bench out in the corridor, taking comfort in its plain hardness, in the way my back begins to ache after a while. Sooner or later they must allow visitors to see Radhika.
“Are you family?” the nurse had asked. I tried to say yes. But I’m only good at lying to myself.
“Sorry,” said the nurse.
Radhika must have called Malik late that night, saying she felt better. She asked him to send the limo, to meet her at his apartment, as they always did. After it was over and he left for his other home—his real home, the mansion up on the hills where his wife and sons slept—she must have done it then. She reached under the bathroom sink where he kept the pills, and smiled a bitter smile. She knew all his secrets now. She looked out the window at his Porsche, its ruby lights receding into fog—but she was the one who was leaving, who was gone already. Out of my life, taking the honorable way, enduring this final night with Malik so I wouldn’t have to be the one to find her body. She had planned it all—except that when she said to the limo driver, “Take me back to my apartment tomorrow, I’m too tired right now,” he had called Malik to check if that was all right.
* * *
AFTER THE GIRL from downstairs had left, I went back into the bathroom. I let the water out of the tub and watched its downward spinning, at once lazy and urgent. I wiped my wet footprints and righted the wastebasket, picking the wadded sheets off the floor. On an impulse I smoothed them out.
There were three of them. One said, Mira . . . One said, I never expected . . . The last was a poem of sorts.
In the desert of my heart,
you, cactus flower,
blooming without thorn.
When she wrote those words, I was dancing. I twirled on tiptoe, making myself tall. My hair wild with abandonment, I let Ajit pull me into his chest, into the possibilities of my new American life.
I THINK NOTHING of the footsteps, muffled on hospital carpeting, until they stop in front of me. Then I look up and it is Malik. His eyes are swollen and I see, with wonder, that he’s been weeping. When he speaks to me, the words glow with hate.
“We were happy until you got here, until you put your sick ideas into her head. I should have gotten rid of you right at the first, when she started acting different. But I didn’t—wouldn’t—believe that she could . . .” A spasm shakes him and he looks away. When he turns back, his voice is cool and serrated. “I’m giving you twenty-four hours to leave.”
I watch him as he walks down the hallway, his right leg dragging a little in a limp I had never noticed. It comes to me that the stories about him are true. But I am too full of other emotions to feel fear. How ironic that of the three of us, he was the one to first smell the change in the air. He brought Ajit over to the cash register, he made the manager give me the evening off for my date. Maybe that’s what she needs. I had thought, naively, that he was talking about me. But he was talking about the woman he loved in spite of himself, the one person who had shown him how, while you tighten your fist around a life, the heart can slip away.
IT TAKES ME only an hour to pack my belongings. I should leave for the bank now, get out what little money I have. Then the Greyhound station, where I need to check the schedule, decide on my destination. Instead I wander through the apartment, touching a table mat Radhika painted, the roses—now dying—that she arranged in a brass vase. I think how I’ve turned out to be all that I dreamed of on the bus—burning wind, bramble bush, things that scorch and scrape. But none of them is what I imagined. It had not struck me that a lit fuse must burn itself first, before setting the world on fire.
Finally, because I must, I go into Radhika’s bedroom.
Radhika’s room reflects her neatness. The bedspread is creaseless, the photos of her parents hang straight and level with each other. Even last night, after getting ready, when there was no longer any need, she had put everything back in its place. Face powder, deodorant, perfume, hair oil. They stand lined up on her dresser, precise, giving nothing away. Comb, brush, filigreed hand mirror. Kumkum powder in a silver box. I pick each one up, try to think what she had thought. Then I see the book.
Splayed at the far end of the dresser, it is the only thing that is out of place. The Great Deserts of the American West, turned to the picture where the miner squinches her eyes against the glare of sun on sand.
I carry the book to Radhika’s bed. When I lay my head on her pillow, it seems I smell her hair.
Down at the Greyhound station, the drivers are starting the engines, lifting their feet off the brakes. The buses begin to roll down the highway, each taking you to a different destiny.
Did the woman in the photo take a bus the day she moved to the hills? How many people had spoken to her in my sister-in-law’s voice, saying what she was doing, it just wasn’t right, wasn’t natural?
She would have shrugged her shoulders, turned her face a little. Maybe she smiled that small, secret smile.
Who is to say? If a woman finds joy in the spare, pared flesh of the desert, if she finds joy in another woman’s sand-brown body, who is to say?
There are so many words I’m searching for, I who had stopped believing in their possibility. In the hospital, as I slip past the nurse’s station, as I look in each room for Radhika, I hope some of them will come to me. She will turn her head away; her earring will glint like an evaporation of dew. But this time around, I’ve learned insistence. On the long bus ride south, and later, in sand and rock, among the fierce momentary blooming of cacti, I’ll lean my head into her shoulder. I’ll run my fingers over her scar the way one reads Braille. Perhaps I’ll find them there, the words for my night with Ajit. The water tank. The women swimming out into the Bombay ocean. For my mother, who also believed that to save the one you love, you have to give up your own life.
On the way out, I glance at the book, the miner holding out her cupped palm, daring us to decipher what in it is sand, and what gold. I decide I know whom she is smiling at. It is her lover, the woman whose shadow has entered the photograph, and in doing so shifted the balance of light.
THE UNKNOWN ERRORS OF OUR LIVES
RUCHIRA IS PACKING when she discovers the notebook in a dusty alcove of her apartment. It is sandwiched between a high school group photo in which she smiles tensely at the camera, her hair hacked short around her ears in a style that was popular that year, and a box of brittle letters, the sheets tinged with blue and smelling faintly of sweet betel nut, from her grandmother, who is now dead. For a moment she fingers the book’s limp purple cover, its squished spiral binding, and wonders what’s inside, it’s been that long since she wrote in it. Then she remembers. Of course! It’s her book of errors, from her midteens, a time she thinks back on now as her Earnest Period.
She imagines telling Biren about it. “I was a gawky girl with a mouth full of braces and a head full of ideas for self-improvement.”
“And then?” he would ask.
“Then I turned twenty-six, and decided I was perfect just the way I was.”
In response, Biren would laugh his silent laugh, which began at the upturned outer edges of his eyes and rippled through him like wind on water. He was the only person she knew who laughed like that, soundlessly, offering his whole body to the act. It made her heart feel like a popcorn popper where all the kernels have burst into neon yellow. She’d respond with a small smile, the kind she hoped made her appear alluring and secretive, but inside she’d be weak with gratitude that he found her so funny.
That, and the way he looked at her paintings. Because otherwise she doesn’t think she could have agreed to marry him.
TO THINK THAT none of this would have happened, that she wouldn’t be sitting here this beautiful rainy morning, pale blue like jacarandas, packing, getting ready to move out of her Berkeley apartment into their newlywed condo in San Francisco in two weeks, if she hadn
’t mumbled an ungracious agreement when her mother said, “Why don’t you meet him, Ru? Kamala Mashi writes so highly of him. Meet him once and see how you like each other.” Ruchira shudders when she realizes how close she had come to saying No, she wasn’t interested, she’d rather use the time to go to Lashay’s and get her hair done. Just because Aunt Kamala had written, Not only is the boy just two years older than our Ruchira and handsome looking, 173 centimeters tall, and holds a fast-rising job in the renowned Charles Schwab financial company, he is also a nephew of the Boses of Tullygunge—you recall them, a fine, upright family—and to top it all he has intelligently decided to follow our time-tested traditions in his search for a bride. It would have been the worst error of her life, and she wouldn’t even have known it. It saddens her to think of all the errors people make (she has been musing over such things lately)—the unknown errors of their lives, the ones they can never put down in a book and are therefore doomed to repeat.
But she had shown up at the Café Trieste, sullen in old blue jeans and a severe ponytail that yanked her eyebrows into a skeptic arch, and met Biren, and been charmed.
“It’s because you were so wary, even more than me,” she told him later. “You’d been reading—wasn’t it one of those depressingly high-minded Russians?”
“Dostoyevsky. Brought along for the precise purpose of impressing you.”
“And for the first fifteen minutes of our conversation, you kept your finger in the book, marking your place, as though you couldn’t wait to get back to it.”
“You mean it wasn’t my suave Johnny Depp looks that got you? I’m disappointed.”
“Dream on,” she said, and gave him a little push. Actually, she’d been rather taken by the stud he wore in his ear. Its small, beckoning glint in the smoke-fogged café had made him seem foreign and dangerous, set him apart from the Indian men she knew, at least the ones who would have agreed to meet a daughter-of-a-friend-of-a-distant-relative for late-afternoon coffee with matrimony in mind. But most of all she liked that he admitted up front to feeling sheepish, sitting like this in a café after having declared, for all those arrogant years (just as she had), that he’d never have anything to do with an arranged marriage.