Sister of My Heart (3 page)

Early in my life I realized something. People were jealous of Sudha and me.

At first I thought it was because our family’s so old and respected. But it couldn’t be that, because everyone knows that we’ve fallen on hard times, and the bookstore that Mother runs is the only source of income we have left. Aunt N is always lamenting in her melodramatic fashion that she’s sitting on poverty’s doorstep, and it’s a good thing that her dear parents are departed, this way they’re spared from seeing their daughter’s sufferings. It couldn’t be our possessions—Sudha and I don’t have many. There just isn’t the money for that, in spite of the long hours Mother puts in at the store and her determination to get us whatever a daughter of the Chatterjees must have. (That’s something else I don’t understand. My mother’s the most intelligent person I know, and the most efficient. Still, the store never seems to make a profit, and each week she has to go over our
household expenses in her careful, frowning way, trying to cut costs.)

But finally I’ve figured it out. What people hate is how happy Sudha and I are when we’re together. How we don’t need anyone else.

It’s been this way ever since we were born. Even before I could walk, Pishi has told me, I’d crawl down the maze of corridors looking for Sudha, both of us shrieking with baby laughter when I finally found her. We’d amuse ourselves for hours at a time, playing with each other’s toes and fingers and hair, and when Aunt N came to take Sudha away we’d throw such tantrums that she retreated, complaining bitterly to Pishi that she didn’t know why she’d gone through all the trouble of labor and birthing, because it was as if she didn’t have a daughter at all.

All through childhood we bathed together and ate together, often from the same plate, feeding each other our favorite items: the crunchy brown triangles of parothas, fried eggplant, spongy-sweet rasogollah balls. Our favorite game was acting out the fairy tales Pishi told us, where Sudha was always the princess and I the prince who rescued her. At night we lay in twin beds in my room, though officially Sudha had a room of her own next to her mother’s, a dark ugly mausoleum filled with old oil paintings and heavy mahogany furniture. We whispered and giggled until Pishi came and threatened us with separation. And when we had nightmares, instead of going to our mothers for comfort, we squeezed into one bed and held each other.

As we grew older, the nuns who ran our convent school were concerned at our closeness. It wasn’t normal, they said. It would stunt our development. They put us in different classes, but all it did was make me sulk. And it made Sudha cry. At recess I’d rush to meet her in the playground, feeling as though the morning had been a pillow held down over my face. When I saw her swollen eyes, rage burned my skin as if it had been rubbed with chili powder, and I’d want to kill someone. That’s when we started
planning our escapes. At first we complained of stomachaches or headaches so we could stay home. When that didn’t work with Pishi, we sneaked out of the school compound at noon, along with the girls who went home for lunch, and spent the afternoon somewhere, anywhere, just so we could be together. We ate peanuts by the lake, walked through the animal market admiring the baby chickens, or rode the tram to the end of the line and back again just in time to meet Singhji at the school gate with our most guileless smiles.

Somehow we’d believed we could get away with it. But of course our teachers complained, and the mothers called us into the study, that dank room filled with dog-eared ledgers and the smell of mildew, where we were summoned only when we were in real trouble. Aunt N insisted we should be given a good spanking, and even Mother, who’s usually so reasonable—her face was white with anger. But when I explained everything, a strange, sad look came into her eyes. And although she told us that our teachers were right, and our education was too important to ruin in this way, the sternness left her voice, and she put out a hand to touch my shoulder.

Later I overheard her telling Pishi that she worried about us. Loving someone so deeply was dangerous. It made you too vulnerable. And Pishi sighed and said, “Yes, we both know that, don’t we?”

The following morning Mother didn’t go to the bookstore—something which hardly ever happened. Instead, she took us to school and, having waved good-bye to us, went into the principal’s office. She never discussed with us what she said in there. But from the next week we were put back in the same class.

All of this didn’t make us popular at school, or later, when news traveled—as news always does in Calcutta—with our neighbors. “Oh those Chatterjee girls,” people said, “forever acting like they’re too good for our daughters. And Anju’s mother, what was she thinking, indulging them this way? Nalini was right,
a good beating would have taught them to behave. To obey rules. You simply wait and see, their troubles are just starting. Everyone knows what happens to girls with that sort of high-nose attitude.”

They didn’t understand that Sudha and I never felt we were better than other people. It was just that we found everything we needed in each other. As Pishi says, Why go to the lake to fetch water when you have a well in your own house already?

One time a neighbor lady said to me, “You’d better not waste all your time with that Sudha. You should be making friends with girls from other important families, especially those who have eligible older brothers with whom your mother could fix up a match for you.” Then she’d added, in a low, confidential voice, “Why do you want to be around a girl who’s so much prettier than you, anyway? Don’t you know that when you’re together people notice your bony legs and teeth braces more than they would have otherwise?”

I was so angry I couldn’t stop myself from telling her it was none of her business. Besides, I didn’t care if a bunch of silly people who didn’t have anything better to do compared our looks. I already knew Sudha was more beautiful. Did that mean I should love her less?

“So virtuous, aren’t you, Miss High and Mighty,” the neighbor woman said. “Watch out! The jealousy’s going to hit you bad one of these days.” She huffed away and I knew exactly what she’d go around telling everyone: what a junglee that Chatterjee girl has become, baap re, but what else can you expect when there’s no man in the house.

But yesterday was the worst of all.

Yesterday Sarita Aunty, one of Aunt N’s fat teatime friends who prides herself on her frankness, saw us entering the house hand in hand. Right away her eyebrows scrunched up in a horrendous frown. “Goodness,” she said, “don’t you girls ever do anything without each other? I swear, you’re like those twins, what do they call them, born stuck together.”

I was about to say, So what if we are? But Sudha, who’s the
polite one, gave my hand a warning squeeze. Then she surprised me by saying, “Didn’t you know, Aunty? We
are
twins.”

Sarita Aunty’s nostrils quivered like an overwrought buffalo’s. “Ei, girl, don’t back-answer me,” she said. “You think I don’t know what’s what? You’re not even first cousins, let alone sisters. Your father was just some kind of distant relation of Anju’s father’s, nothing like a real brother.”

Odd, isn’t it, how some people take pleasure in hurting others.

I tried to say something scathing to shut her up, but I couldn’t speak. If Mother had been there, she would have come to my rescue with one of her cool, calm sayings.
Who are we to judge relationships, Sarita? Are we not all related in God’s eye?
But she was at the bookstore, and the words
You’re not even first cousins, let alone sisters
pounded inside my head like hammers gone berserk.

Aunt N looked as if someone had made her bite into a lemon. She’s always going on and on about how much better things were in her father’s house—servants and children knowing their place, even the cows producing, obediently, more milk than any of the neighboring cattle—until you would have thought she wished she wasn’t related to us at all. But she doesn’t like anyone else reminding her of her tenuous connection to the Chatterjees.

Sarita Aunty went on triumphantly, “The two of you weren’t even born at the same time, or under the same star either. Am I right, Nalini Di?”

For a moment Aunt N acted as if she didn’t hear the question. But then she couldn’t resist the opportunity to be melodramatic. She gave a martyr’s sigh and said, “You’re quite right, because although Anju was born right at noon, Sudha”—here she looked accusingly at my cousin—”didn’t come until midnight. What a labor I had with her! The pain was like a thousand jabbing knives! I screamed and screamed, and I was losing blood also. The midwife, a youngish woman, not experienced like the ones at my mother’s confinements, was so frightened she said maybe they should send for the English doctor, although everyone knew he
always cut open the mothers’ stomachs and quite a few of them died of the fever afterward.”

We’d heard all this a hundred times. But Sudha looked up wide-eyed and said, as though it were a whole new story, “But he didn’t have to do that to you, did he?”

“No …”

“That’s because Anju saved you, isn’t it?”

Aunt N glared at her daughter. She didn’t like being interrupted in the middle of an exciting story, particularly when she was the suffering heroine.

“Actually I think it was the lucky childbirth amulet I’d had the forethought to buy the month before from a traveling roja—”

“Tell what happened next,” Sudha interrupted, surprising me again. Usually she’s so quiet around her mother. “Tell about Gouri Ma.”

Aunt N clicked her tongue in annoyance and made like she’d stop. But after a moment she continued, because at her heart she loves a good story as much as we do.

“When your Gouri Aunty heard what was going on, she climbed out of bed. The midwife kept telling her she mustn’t, because she’d lost a lot of blood too, but she paid her no attention. Somehow she walked all the way across the hall with Anju in her arms and put her face-down on my stomach. Anju lay there for a moment, draped over my huge belly—I was very big, even though it was only the end of the eighth month. I tell you”—here Aunt N gave another dramatic sigh—”I simply never recovered my figure afterward. Anyway, I guess Anju didn’t like being there, because all at once she gave a loud cry, and right then I felt a contraction so strong it was like my backbone was snapping in two. Next thing I knew, the midwife was handing Sudha to me, saying It’s another girl.”

“That’s why Anju’s my twin, don’t you see?” Sudha said, and it seemed to me that she was talking to her mother as well as to Sarita Aunty. “Because she called me out into the world.” And
she put her arm around my neck, my usually quiet cousin, and smiled a brilliant smile that left the two women wordless.

I couldn’t have done it better myself.

There are other reasons why I can never hate Sudha. Once I made a list of them.

Because she’s the most beautiful person I know, just like the princesses in the fairy tales Pishi tells us, with her skin that’s the warm brown of almond milk, her hair soft like monsoon clouds all the way down her back, and her eyes that are the softest of all.

Because she can put her hand on my arm when I’m ready to kick the world for its stupidity, and it’s like a drink of clean cold water on a hot day.

Because she believes in magic, demons and gods and falling stars to wish on, the way I never could.

Because she’s the best storyteller, better even than Pishi. She can take the old tales and make them new by putting us in them. Us, Anju and Sudha, right in there among the demon queens and fairy princes and talking beasts.

Because I called her into the world and, therefore, must do all I can to make sure she is happy.

ANJU GROWS UPSET
whenever I ask Pishi about the day our fathers died. Why can’t you forget it? she says. Why can’t you just let it go? If you always look backward, you’ll never get anywhere in life. Besides, what’s there to know about two men who didn’t have the sense to stay home where they’d have been safe, instead of going gallivanting in search of some stupid adventure?

There is truth in what she says, I admit it. And for once the mothers are on her side. My mother thinks it’s bad luck to talk of that day. Gouri Ma says it is better for us to focus our thoughts on more positive things. And Pishi, our enthusiastic informant in matters of the past, will give us only a few reluctant details before she changes the subject.